


Up a Long Ladder

by MacBeth



Category: MacGyver (TV)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Gen, Novella, Whump, language warning, macgyverisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-03
Updated: 2011-10-24
Packaged: 2017-10-24 07:15:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 32,170
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/260558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MacBeth/pseuds/MacBeth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>November, 1985.  An unusual invitation brings Pete and MacGyver to Ireland, where they must struggle to thwart a terrorist plot and preserve a fragile peace on the bloody streets of Belfast. First season; no spoilers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Invitation

_I was born on a Dublin street  
         Where the loyal drums do beat  
         And the loving British feet they tramped all o’er us  
         And every single night  
         When me father came home tight  
         He’d invite the neighbours outside with this chorus:_

 _Come out, you Black-and-Tans,  
         Come out and fight me like a man!  
         Show your wife how you won medals down in Flanders  
         Tell her how the IRA  
         Made you run like hell away  
         From the green and lovely lanes of Killeshandra . . ._

 

 _  
**Prologue:  Selection**   
_

 

Someday, Major Kathleen Walsh told herself, computers would actually be able to store and display images, and the whole tiresome process of sorting back and forth between the computerized lists and the paper dossiers would be fast and simple.  Until then, she was never going to end a day without a throbbing ache behind her eyes.

But she was sure she had the best possible match now.  She pushed aside the other photos in the stack and studied her final choice:  a burly, balding man in a suit and tie, intelligent eyes giving life and spark even to an official posed photo.  Laugh lines in the face gave him a jovial look, but there was a tough strength to the expression that belied any sense of softness or complacency.

“Right, Grant.  You can bag the next round of searching; we’ve got our man.”  At her words, her assistant glanced up from another stack of dossiers.  She held the file out to him.  After a moment’s glance, he began to read aloud in the rich, plummy Oxbridge accent that he knew privately annoyed her.

“Peter David Thornton.  American.  Born in Chicago, South Side, in – well, let’s just say he’s well past the first flower of youth.  Still holding up under the full brunt as an accredited field operative, hmm, not bad at his age.  Divorced – no surprise there – one son, no close family ties – again, no surprise.”

“Divorced.  He’s not Catholic, then?  Hard to tell with an American . . . ”

“No information on religious affiliation.”

“Fancy that not mattering enough to mention,” Walsh murmured.

Grant cleared his throat and continued.  “Parents have shuffled off the mortal coil and need have no fear he will put them to the blush.  Father was a copper, son went into military intelligence . . . ”

“You can leave off the inevitable cliché about oxymorons, Grant.  All avenues for originality down that road were exhausted long since.”

Grant gave a faint mocking bow of assent.  “Rose to the rank of Colonel, made the hop from military to government service . . . ”

“Political allegiance?”

“Again, not specified.  He’s held a nice clean upwards course through several administrations, so who can say?  Terribly old school, though – espouses human rights, detests wasting lives, sticks his neck out for his men – ”

“Hard to believe he actually saw service in Vietnam.”

“Served with distinction there, if that isn’t another oxymoron.  Other known and suspected areas of operation include the USSR, several intriguing corners of the Eastern Bloc – the chap gets around, doesn’t he? – North Africa, the Middle East, Afghanistan and its unlovely neighbours, China – now ensconced at the DXS, and quite the golden boy there, by all accounts.”  He raised sardonic eyes to Walsh.  “Best strike whilst the iron is hot.  Looks like he’s due to get kicked upstairs to the far side of a nice wide desk, and you’ll never winkle him out for anything as grotty as mere field work.  _Must_ we deal with the DXS?”

“He’s far and away the best prospect we’ve got.”  Walsh looked tiredly at the stack of discarded dossiers.  Thank God they had finally given her an assistant with the necessary clearance to handle them, or she’d still be doing her own filing.  “Get the rest of this shite cleared up, will you?  Now that we’ve got our man, we have to get him here _and_ in the right frame of mind for a little adventure, and that’s going to take very careful staging.”

“And just how are you going to arrange that?  Call him up and announce that we found a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and his name and address were on the handle?  Tell him he’s the long-lost heir of a Flown Earl?”

Walsh smiled cat-like.  “I’ll think of something.”

“It would never occur to you to simply ask them to let us borrow him for a week or ten days.”

“If we do that, I’ll have to tell too many people what’s in hand.  _And_ I’ll owe his bosses a favor.  I don’t really want to be beholden to that lot.”  She handed the stack of discarded folders to Grant.

“Well, if this works, you’ll owe _him_ a favor.”

Walsh shrugged.  “Assuming he doesn’t get his head blown off.  The last DXS boyo we had to deal with was a right eejit.”

“Hardly his fault – his superiors didn’t tell him half of what they knew, and half of that was wrong.”

“He was still as dumb as a post.”

“And now he’s dead as a doornail.”  Grant tucked the folders under his arm.  “They give Darwin a free hand at the DXS.”

Walsh’s feline smile returned, with bitter lines creasing its edge.  “And that’s so very different from here.”

 

 

 _  
**One:  Invitation**   
_

 

 _It’s funny about assumptions – they are the sneakiest things you’ll ever come across.  My Little Brother Reggie can be sneaky when he’s angling for a jump shot, but he’s got nothing on assumptions.  You don’t even notice how they’ve crept up on you until they’ve gotten in front of you and are somehow managing to stare you in the face and block your view at the same time.  It ruins your perspective._

 _Speaking of Reggie, I’ve got to get him to a hockey game, or he’ll grow up thinking basketball is the be-all and end-all.  I can’t let that happen to my Little Brother; I’d be letting him down._

 _Once I’m back from my newest assignment, that is.  Which brings me back to the assumptions I hadn’t noticed I was making._

 _Because everyone knows what terrorists are like._

 

Pete Thornton stopped in the doorway of his own office at DXS headquarters to survey the chaos.  “I should have guessed.”

MacGyver’s head popped up from the far side of where Pete’s desk should have been.  “Hey, Pete!  You’re finally back.  Shoulda guessed what?”

Pete looked around at the office that had been tidy when he’d left it.  Mac’s battered brown leather jacket was tossed over one chair and a pile of books and papers and manila folders was sliding off another, while Pete’s desk had been pushed aside to leave more room around the desk chair.  The big leather chair itself was balanced upside down, wheels pointing at the ceiling, propped up by a side table.  Half the items on Pete’s desk seemed to have toppled in the disturbance.  “I should have guessed that, when Helen told me you were ‘occupying’ my office, she was trying to tell me you’d turned into a one-man army of occupation.”

“Just trying to keep _myself_ occupied till the Deputy Director let you go.  How long ago did the hydraulics on your desk chair start to give out, anyway?”

“Um . . . ”  Pete glanced back over his shoulder at Helen, who shook her head firmly at the silent plea for help and retreated.  “I don’t really remember – I never seem to have time to sit down these days anyway.”

“Yeah, no kidding.  You’re either on assignment or closeted with the D.D.  We were gonna get out to your cabin weeks ago, and you’ve been puttin’ it off.”  MacGyver lifted the chair in one smooth move, turned it right-side up and set it back on its casters, and spun it around with a flourish to face Pete.  “Give it a try.”

Pete sat down cautiously and nodded with satisfaction as the chair held its position under his weight, with no sign of the faint sagging he’d been ignoring for weeks.  He stood up again quickly; Mac was sliding Pete’s desk back into position, and everything on its surface that hadn’t already slid off or fallen over was now swaying.  As he started to put things to rights, Pete spared a moment to wonder which of his office supplies MacGyver might have cannibalized to effect the repairs to the chair, how long it would take him to notice what was gone, and whether Helen, with her usual efficiency, would identify the missing items and provide replacements before he had the time and opportunity to figure it out himself.  Probably – especially with his new assignment already in the works.

“Pete, what the heck is this supposed to mean?”  Pete fielded his own note easily as MacGyver flipped it at him across the desk; Mac had folded it origami-style into a tidy flat triangular packet.

“Look, I’m sorry.  I didn’t have time to leave anything detailed.”

“Details?  I thought you’d taken to leavin’ riddles.”

“It got your attention, anyway.”

Mac suppressed a grin.  He’d found the note when he’d returned from a sea kayaking trip.  But even without it, he’d been planning to check in with Pete and see if anything interesting was developing.  The note read:  _Fresh crop of terrorists for you, guaranteed camel-free.  Pack warm clothing for once.  Briefing at 0900, my office._

“So.  No camels, huh?”

“MacGyver, terrorism isn’t limited to desert countries and oil fiefdoms.”  Pete tossed the folded note back to Mac, who caught it one-handed.  “Ever been to Ireland?”

“No.  Isn’t that more in your line?”

“I’m not talking about my family tree.  I’m talking about terrorists.”

“The IRA.”

“Yeah.”  Pete caught a stack of papers before they slid off the desk and straightened the edges neatly.  “Or, at least, the most recent efforts by the British Army Intelligence services to contain them.  Our Director has received a gilt-edged invitation to an inter-organizational symposium they’re hosting in Belfast.  They want representatives from as many counter-terrorism groups as possible to participate, share information, compare notes and techniques – and they’ve asked for me, personally, to attend.”

“Sounds like a good enough idea.”  MacGyver’s voice drifted up from where he was collecting scattered pens from the floor.  “What’s the catch?”

“ _Is_ there a catch?”

Mac straightened up and gave Pete a searching look. “You tell me.”  He dropped half a dozen pens on the desk.  “You’ve got that look in your eye.  I trust that look.”

“I’ve got that feeling in my gut.”

“Don’t you trust it?”

Pete shrugged and picked up the pens.  “I don’t know. There’s nothing I can put my finger on.”

“I thought things were gettin’ quieter there.  Didn’t they just work out some kind of treaty?”

“You mean the Anglo-Irish Agreement?  They just signed it after months of negotiations, and the only thing anyone agrees on is that everyone hates it.  There’ve been protests, riots, more bombs, more shootings . . . the government’s getting it from all sides.  Some of the sides are splintering into even more factions, and the only thing they hate more than each other is the British.  Northern Ireland has been a war zone for fifteen years, and now they’re afraid it’s going to snowball into a new escalation.”  Pete looked around for his pen holder, couldn’t find it, and dropped the pens into a drawer instead.

“Well, Belfast sounds like a _real_ party town.”  Pete looked up, surprised at the edge in MacGyver’s voice.  “And you’re gonna go there as the special guest of the British Army?  Pete, do you _have_ to accept this invitation?”

“I told you.  They asked for me specifically.”

“Aaand . . . ?”

“And I want you to come too.”

Pete had half expected a protest or an objection, but it didn’t come.  Instead, Mac picked up a paperweight that had miraculously remained in place, turning it over in his long fingers.  “Was I invited?”

“You’d be attached to me as the DXS’ premiere expert in bomb defusing and disposal.  I told the Director I wanted to take you with me for backup, and he agreed.  Then I had to explain to the Deputy Director that you couldn’t be in two places at once and he’d have to find someone else to send to Bangalore.  Unless you’d prefer the climate in Bangalore?”

“In the monsoon season?  I don’t think Ireland has a monsoon season.”

“Just as well – it would probably make the terrorists even harder to catch.”

“Pete.”  Mac set the paperweight down.  “If it’s safe, why take backup?  And if it’s so dangerous, why go?”

“That’s just the problem.”  Pete stooped to retrieve another item from the floor:  the frame holding the photos of his ex-wife and son.  “I don’t know.”

MacGyver’s voice was soft now, without the edge of agitated concern.  “What’s your gut tellin’ you?”

Pete carefully set the photos in their usual place, where he could see them easily on the rare occasions when he had time to look up.  “It’s telling me to go.  _And_ it’s telling me to take you along.”

Mac’s sudden grin held no trace of reserve or anxiety.  “When do we leave?”

-


	2. Preparation

_**Two: Preparation** _

 

As the 747 began its descent into Heathrow, Pete gathered his files and dossiers together, shuffled the stack back into his briefcase, and glanced at the younger man sprawled in the window seat beside him.  He had been partnered with MacGyver dozens of times over the years, and yet they rarely began a mission together.  Circumstances and strategy often dictated that the two men take different routes to whatever theater of operations the DXS had chosen for them.  For this mission as well, they would part company in London and enter Belfast separately; but the flight out from L.A. had given them a rare opportunity to prepare together – although their methods of mission prep were so wildly different that Pete would have found it infuriating if the insight into MacGyver’s mental processes hadn’t been so fascinating.

Pete had armed himself with a battery of reports, dossiers, and statistical analyses of the current situation in Northern Ireland, plus the most current intelligence reports on the positions, tactics, and recent activity of the various IRA factions and splinter groups, and worked his way methodically through the arsenal of information.  MacGyver picked up files at random, skimming some and ignoring others, occasionally reading in depth but often abandoning a file midway through only to return to it later.  He read at what looked like breakneck speed, but Pete had no doubt that, if taxed with any question about the details, Mac would have no trouble recalling whatever had caught his firefly attention.

He spent more time over the detail maps of Belfast and its environs than any other item, but gave only the most cursory survey to the summary of the current political situation.  Pete couldn’t blame him for that; the so-called political summary ran to several long-winded pages and read like a gruesome soap opera, so tangled with factional infighting, backstabbing, shortsighted vendetta and fraternal hatred that attempting to follow even the broad outlines was enough to provoke a migraine.  Long before the plane reached the mid-Atlantic, Mac set aside the dossiers and instead fished a book out of his bag, a recently-published first-person account of the “Troubles” with a bookmark already located almost halfway through.  Two hours’ reading advanced the bookmark well towards the end.

“Good book?” Pete finally asked.

“It’s better written than your dossiers, at least.”  MacGyver closed the still unfinished book, tucked it back into his bag, and stretched his long legs as far as the cramped quarters would allow.  “It’s nice to have a little legroom for a change.  How’d we luck into first class seats anyhow?  Anything to do with that rumor that you’re up for a big promotion soon?”

“Rumor?”  Pete kept his tone carefully bland, although Mac’s grin gave it the lie.  Pete fished out another dossier.  “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Aw, c’mon, Pete, you’re not foolin’ anyone.  Not me, at any rate.”

“Our hosts paid for my seat, and I strongarmed the DXS into upgrading yours on the grounds that we needed to brief for the mission together.”

Mac’s grin broadened.  “I’m drivin’ you nuts, aren’t I?”  He picked up the political summary again and made a face at it.  “It’s like trying to memorize all the twists in a plate of spaghetti.  And by the time we get there, the whole situation could change again.  The only thing that’ll be the same is the hatred.”  He pulled out the sectarian map of Belfast and looked again at the clashing crazy-quilt of streets and neighborhoods, each clearly delineated in green or orange.  “You know, I talked to Sinead, the redhead in Mapping, while you were collecting the rest of the reports.”

“Have you asked her for a date yet?”

Mac gave him an exasperated look.  “C’mon, Pete.  I’m not her type.  Anyway, I asked her why this map doesn’t show any neutral ground.  She said, ‘Don’t kid yourself.  There isn’t any.’”

“She’s from Derry, isn’t she?”

“Yeah – and _don’t_ call it ‘Londonderry’ where she can hear you.  She also said, ‘If there was any neutral territory, both sides would bomb the heck out of it.’ ”

Pete raised an eyebrow.  “I bet that’s _not_ the word she actually used.”

“It wasn’t.”  MacGyver ran a fingertip along the paper where a dozen dark lines of different lengths snaked between green and orange patches.  “What’s really kinda creepy are these . . . they call ‘em ‘peace lines’.  They’re _walls_ , Pete.”

“Walls?  As in ‘Berlin’?”

Mac nodded.  “Twenty feet high, some of ’em, with barbed wire on top and armed police guards at the gates.”

“That seems a little drastic.”

“Yeah.  I thought so too.  Here’s something to think about:  who’s bein’ locked in, and who’s bein’ locked out?”

Pete studied the map.  “It looks like they’re intended to keep some of the neighborhoods separated – or segregated.  ‘Good fences make good neighbors’?”

“When the fence is that good, can you still think of the guy on the other side as a neighbor?”  MacGyver tossed the file back onto Pete’s stack.  “I’m gonna take a nap while I can.  I kinda doubt I’ll be wallowing in luxury like this once we split up.”

“Yeah – well, rank hath its hazards.”

_Pete was right, of course, and so was I.  At Heathrow, I faded into the crowd and watched Pete’s VIP reception – we both knew that he’d be looking at Belfast from behind a wall of tailored suits and British Army uniforms, piled too high to catch any of the kind of details we might want later.  I caught a short flight that hopped across the Irish Sea to Shannon Airport:  not much legroom, but no suits to block the view when I landed._

_I’d never been in Ireland before and I wanted to get the lie of the land.  Maps are great, don’t get me wrong – when I was a kid, I’d spend hours poring over every kind of map I could get my hands on, imagining myself into every corner, especially the blank spaces – but nothing teaches you a countryside like going through it mile by mile._

_Of course, in some places, “getting the lie of the land” means something other than looking at the scenery._

The proud owner of McMahon’s Road Rentals on Fergus Road, just off the N19 out of Shannon, was waving enthusiastically at a well-polished motorcycle.  “I’m tellin’ you, you won’t find a sweeter machine in all of Connacht, not from here to Sligo.  Just look at her.  She won’t give you a moment’s trouble.”  He patted the glossy black leather seat with a large, rough-hewn hand covered with reddish hair.  “And the girls won’t be able to keep their eyes off you, if you know what I mean.”

MacGyver couldn’t help watching McMahon’s left eye for twitches, but their absence didn’t reassure him.  He finally interrupted the spiel.  “How long’s it been since your mechanic quit?”

“What?”

“It’s been at least a month, right?  All the polish in the world only goes so far.”  McMahon’s eye still wasn’t twitching, but he was glaring.  “Tell you what,” Mac said easily.  “I’ll fix the oil leak on this one for you, _and_ the gearshift problem you’re having with _that_ one, and in return, let’s see – ”  He walked a few steps farther into the rental yard and pointed.  “You rent me _that_ one over there by the fence.”

McMahon spoke very softly.  “You’re pretty sure of yourself, Yank.”

MacGyver shrugged.

“That’s my best bike you’re after wanting – it’s _my_ bike.”

Mac nodded.  “I figured.  It’s the only one that’s had any maintenance lately.  Whoever’s been workin’ on it, you should hire him to keep the others in shape.  It’s a shame to let good machinery go like this.”

“And I suppose you’re wantin’ me to charge you the same as I’d charge me own brother?”

“Depends.  You on good terms with your brother?”

McMahon suddenly roared with laughter and gave Mac a staggering clap on the back. “He was my mechanic! Gone six weeks now. Jaysus, but I miss him. And he didn’t quit – he emigrated.” The proprietor shook his head. “The good ones always leave. There’s nothin’ for them here.” He gave MacGyver a searching look, from scuffed tennis shoes to battered brown leather jacket to untidy hair: a more thorough version of the swift and superficial appraisal Mac had received on arrival. “Have at it, Yank. Tools are in the shed. And don’t be blamin’ me now – truth, you didn’t exactly come in here lookin’ the road warrior.”

“Well, maybe I don’t plan on picking a fight with the road.”

McMahon frowned.  “Bound for County Antrim, didn’t you say?  Belfast?”

“Yeah, eventually.”

“Watch your back, Yank.  It may be the road will be pickin’ a fight with you.”

_Ireland isn’t that big; the whole island would fit into Minnesota three times over – it’s just over 200 miles from Shannon to Belfast, and I thought I could make it in three hours.  Heck, if I left my loft in LA and drove the same distance, in the same direction, I’d still be in California – in either the Sequoia National Forest or Death Valley, depending on which road I took._

_The road from Shannon to the border between Ireland – the Republic of Ireland, I mean – and Northern Ireland didn’t exactly pick a fight, but, well, it was awful scrappy.  Put another way, it was awful.  By the time my three hours had turned into five and I’d figured out that the speed limit signs were in miles per hour and most of the distance signs were in kilometres – all except the ones that weren’t – I was glad Pete and I didn’t have a meet planned for later that day.  All I had to do was show up in Belfast by the next morning at the latest.  And, if possible, get across the border before the short autumn day ended and left me literally in the dark._

_It did give me time to think, though, and look at the countryside – when I wasn’t dodging potholes – which was the whole idea, after all.  They call Ireland the ‘Four Green Fields’, and they aren’t kidding about the green part.  A motorcycle ride on a bright, cool November day through all that rolling green countryside, not much traffic – well, it sure beats riding a camel over blazing sand.  It should’ve been soothing; Ireland’s just a bit north of where Minnesota is, and even the angle of the sunlight felt familiar._

_Maybe my reading made me edgy, or Pete’s instincts, or the way most of the distance signs didn’t mention Belfast until I started getting real close to the border, like they didn’t want to admit it was there.  Or the Four Green Fields business.  Three of the “fields” – the old provinces – are in the Irish Republic, and the fourth one, most of it, belongs to the UK.  So as short as my trip was, I was still crossing into a different country.  There was a border.  It had a border crossing and a border guard, and except for the sun’s angle it wasn’t anything like crossing into Canada._

_This little green corner of the world has been under martial law for a decade and a half – back when I was defusing bombs in ‘Nam, the IRA was planting them all over that green field in the North._

Where the N12 crossed from County Monaghan into County Armagh and became the A3, there was no river or natural division, not even a change of language on the signs, just a barrier located on an otherwise entirely unremarkable stretch of road.  If there hadn’t been a guarded border post, there would have been nothing to show that one country’s sovereignty had given way to another.  The border guard had a thick northern accent, a pugnacious jaw, and a chip on his shoulder.  Most border guards did, in MacGyver’s experience, but somehow he hadn’t expected this one.

“ _MacGyver_ , is it?”  The guard turned Mac’s passport this way and that, as if he expected to shake something questionable out from between the well-thumbed pages.  “Yank, are ye?  And what might be your business in our fine outpost of the British Empire?”  He spat out the final words as if they burned his tongue.

Mac shrugged.  “Just lookin’ around.”

“Lookin’ for your roots, I suppose?  Pinin’ for a taste of the Auld Sod?  Most of you soddin’ Yanks are.  Are ye hopin’ to find some quaint village full of long-lost kinfolk who’ll clasp ye about the neck and kill the feckin’ fatted calf for their fine Yankee cousin?”

“Um, no . . . as far as I know, I don’t have any Irish relatives at all.”  _Now, if you were asking Pete . . . wonder what he’ll say when I tell him about this guy.  He’ll either laugh or choke.  
_

“Don’t ye now?  With that name?”  The guard leant in close and sneered.  “Well, rest assured, if ye do, the whole lot’ll be descendents of murderers, rapists and thieves.  Ye keep that in mind, so.”

“ **O’Hare**!”  The British Army officer in charge of the post descended like the wrath of Heaven.  He was at least fifteen years younger and fifty pounds thinner than his subordinate, but at his approach the border guard shrank sullenly into himself.  “You bloody feckless idiot, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”  He turned to MacGyver.  “Do excuse us, young man.  Is this pathetic fool giving you any difficulty?”

The guard hastily handed Mac’s passport back.  His eyes had flashed in pure rage at the grating voice of his young superior, followed by the cornered look of desperate, bone-deep panic.  MacGyver was painfully aware of the man’s sudden and dangerous vulnerability.  One word of complaint could ruin the man’s career, possibly send him to prison – but no, that was the kind of thing that might happen at a _Soviet_ border.  The UK didn’t treat its own citizens with that kind of brutality . . . but O’Hare’s face didn’t offer any reassurance.

Mac gave the officer in charge a bland, bright smile. “Naw, nuthin’s wrong at all. This nice fella was just givin’ me his suggestions for good places to go in Belfast.”

“Really.”

“Well, yeah, he was about to when you interrupted us.  Nice country you got here, y’know.  Real friendly people.”  Mac turned back to O’Hare.  “What was that pub you said was worth a visit?”  _He’s got to know at least one.  C’mon, help me out here.  Cover your butt._

O’Hare was quick enough on the uptake.  “Ach, you’ll be wantin’ to look in at Conway’s Bar on Conway Street, off of Falls Road – ’tis run by me brother-in-law’s cousin.  Tell them Kevin O’Hare sent ye – they’ll look after yourself right enough, so they will.”  He was studying MacGyver carefully, as if only beginning to believe that he might be safe after all.

Mac grinned.  “Thanks, buddy.  I’ll remember that.”

O’Hare met his eyes as he opened the barrier and waved Mac through.  “As will I, Yank,  Count on it.”

Once over the border, the road improved dramatically; the renamed A3 ran smoothly towards Belfast.  MacGyver made much better time on the last stage of his trip, but the late afternoon warmth of the slanting sunlight seemed thinner than before.

-


	3. Suspicion

_**Three: Suspicion** _

_**  
** _

Major Kathleen Walsh, British Army Intelligence Service, proved to be charming and intelligent, an excellent speaker, facilitator, and symposium host, and – as it transpired – an amusing and vivacious dinner companion.  She had been born south of Belfast, but had mostly served overseas and even knew some of the same cities Pete did.  Despite the grim nature of the symposium topics and the occasionally gruesome discussions, Pete would have enjoyed himself overall – if he could have convinced himself that he was only imagining the faint but persistent smell of a rat.

Major Walsh also kept Pete’s schedule so full that, by mid-afternoon on the third and final day of the conference, he still hadn’t had any opportunity for private speech with MacGyver.  They’d seen each other often enough:  Mac was in every general session, not sitting too close but never very far away.  He hung around in corridors and materialized inside conference rooms where breakout sessions were being set up, never seeming out of place while managing to be everywhere.  When he wasn’t on a silent periphery, Pete often saw him in animated conversation with other attendees – or, more frequently, with the staff and support personnel.  On at least four different occasions, he’d spotted Mac fixing some recalcitrant piece of audio or video equipment while the British Army officer in charge of technical support stood around looking either flustered or grateful.

Kathleen Walsh never seemed to notice MacGyver, and had barely nodded when Pete had introduced them on the first day.  For his part, Mac seemed to be deliberately avoiding her notice, although he took more than one opportunity to bait her assistant, Grant, a young British Army Lieutenant whose obsequious mannerisms irritated both Americans almost beyond endurance.

When the final session ended at last amongst sincere expressions of inter-organizational camaraderie, Pete tried to slip out of the main conference room without calling attention to himself or being buttonholed.  But as he turned away from the cluster of VIPs exchanging animated farewells, Grant appeared in his path.

“Lieutenant.”  Pete nodded and tried to slip past without the evasion being too obvious.

“Col. Thornton – ”

“Please, I’ve told you already, _Mister_ is fine.  Or just Pete.  I don’t bother with the ‘Colonel’ nonsense these days unless I have to.”

Pete ground his teeth at the young man’s unctuous grin.  “Oh, but I can’t do that.  Major Walsh would _never_ condone that level of informality.  She’s looking for you, by the way.  I believe she’s hoping to detain you for dinner this evening.”

“ _Mr. Thornton!?_ Sorry to butt in like this – ”  MacGyver’s voice cut across Grant’s over-rich accent like a slow knife through cheese, the Minnesota drawl so exaggerated that Pete had to stifle a laugh.  “Excuse me!  Gosh, I’m sorry about that.  Was that your foot, Mr. Grant?  Mr. Thornton, I’ve got an urgent message for you from Barrington – he wants to ask you about Cairo, and it just can’t wait.”

Pete breathed deeply again.  In their private code, ‘Cairo’ meant that they needed to talk privately, while ‘Barrington’ – or any name beginning with a B – meant that Mac had found a location where that would be possible, and all Pete had to do was to play along.  “MacGyver, it can’t be that important,” he snapped to cover his sudden surge of relief.  “Couldn’t you put him off?  You know what an old woman Barrington is.  I briefed him fully before I left!”

“Yeah, yeah, I know, but he insisted.  It won’t take long – they have a room standing by for you with a secure phone line.”  MacGyver took Pete’s elbow and steered him away from Grant.

“It’s about damned time,” Pete murmured as Mac led him from the plush carpeted corridors of the conference center into the utilitarian backcountry.  “You’ve been playing the ‘junior colleague’ role so well, I’d practically forgotten what your voice sounds like.”  They entered a small room with plain white walls, unfurnished except for two chairs and a small table with a telephone, a pad of paper and a pen.  Mac swung the door shut, picked up the phone and dialed rapidly, then held it out as Pete settled into one of the chairs.

Pete held the handset to his ear, wondering at the charade, and had to swallow another laugh as the automated voice chirped in his ear.

“At the tone, the time will be ... eleven ... fifteen … am.  The temperature in ... Washington, DC ... is … forty … eight … degrees.”

MacGyver hadn’t taken the other chair; instead, he was leaning over Pete so as to effectively block his face from any observer.  Pete kept the telephone handset in front of his mouth and spoke quietly.

“Any surveillance inside this room?”

Mac’s eyes glanced around.  “If there is, it’s _really_ well hidden.”

“‘If’?  If _you’re_ saying ‘if’, that’s good enough for me.”  Pete began to lower the receiver, then stopped at the faint shake of Mac’s head.

“Not good enough for me.”

“Mac, the British are _supposed_ to be our _allies_.”

“Yup.  So why’d you bring me along?”

Pete couldn’t help playing devil’s advocate. “Well, it _has_ been an interesting event.  We really could do with more of this kind of cross-organizational cooperation.”

“Yeah, it’s been a real eye-opener.  Did you know what the IRA is doing with bomb threats these days?  They call in a warning – to a _school_ , say – and watch to see where the evacuees go.  The next day, or the next week, they call in another threat.  But there’s no bomb at the _school_.  No, _they bomb the evacuation zone_.”  Mac looked as sick as Pete had ever seen him.  “D’you know what the life expectancy is for _kids_ here?”

“Yeah, I know.  And you know what?  _I’m_ not used to being called ‘naïve’.  Do you know what Kathleen said to me on my first evening here?”

MacGyver didn’t comment on Pete’s use of their hostess’ first name.  “No, what?”

“She said, ‘God help you Yanks if the terrorists ever show up on your own soil.’”

Mac winced and nodded.  “So – do you really think this was just about teaming up to beat the bad guys?  _Is_ there anything else going on?”

Pete hesitated, picking up the pen from the table and tapping it against the phone base.  All he had was instinct – but his instincts had saved his life – and others’ – too many times to be ignored.  “I don’t know – ”

“Aw, the heck with _knowing_ , Pete!  What d’you _feel_?”

“Okay, fine!  There’s something else going on, has been from the start, and I _still don’t know what it is_!”

“They’ve been real friendly.” MacGyver looked searchingly at Pete.  He had wondered at Major Walsh’s attentions but hesitated to probe further.

“That’s just it.”  Pete started to lower the telephone handset, then recalled himself.  “They’re friendly and accommodating – and they know me just a _little_ bit too well.  _Too_ thoroughly.  You know what I mean?”

Suddenly Mac did know.  “They’ve reviewed your dossier recently.  In detail.”

“Bingo.”

“Now why would they do that?”

“I don’t know.  But I _do_ know that they didn’t review yours.”  Pete grinned.  “You’re a wild card.”

Mac returned the grin.  “Always glad to oblige.”  He filched the pen from Pete and started to fiddle with it.  “So what’s the game?  How’re you gonna play your wild card?”

“Good question.”  MacGyver watched Pete frown over the phone and nod vigourously at its inane repetition, the old campaigner carrying on the charade even as his mind was elsewhere.  “The symposium’s over . . . whatever they’ve got in mind, they’ll have to do it soon.  When Grant buttonholed me just now, he was extending another dinner invitation from Kath – from Major Walsh.”

Mac studied the pen in his hand.  “She’s a special lady.”  In his peripheral vision, he saw Pete start to smile a bit too broadly and then check himself.  “No, I really mean it.”

“What are you trying to say, Mac?”

“Well, she’s a local, isn’t she?  More or less?”

“She’s from County Down – about twenty miles south of here.  What about it?”

“Something I noticed starting at the border.  Literally.  You know how, everywhere you go in the whole Eastern bloc, you find Soviet officers talking Russian right out of a Moscow prep school, and local staff whose Russian is, well, even worse than mine when I’m out of practice.  You get used to hearing the accents split between rank and file.”

Pete nodded.  When he and MacGyver received their intensive Russian language training, as well as the periodic refresher courses they were required to take, the DXS always went to great lengths to provide tutors with well-educated Muscovite accents.

“It’s the same here.  The orders are given in English accents and taken in Irish.  Pete, whose country is this supposed to be anyway?  Never mind.  What I mean is that Major Walsh is the highest-ranked person I’ve met so far that actually has an Irish accent.”

Pete looked thoughtful.  “You’ve talked to a lot more of the personnel here than I have.”

“I haven’t been sewn up in a VIP bag.”

“I know.”  Pete nodded again, briskly, to the phone and hung up.  “C’mon, let’s go.”

MacGyver put the pen down, startled.  “Where to?”

“We’re going to go find Major Walsh, and I’m going to ask her what she’s up to.”  Pete stood up.  “Nicely, of course.”

“You think she’ll tell you?”

“I think she meant to tell me over dinner.  But _you_ weren’t invited.”  Pete reached the door in two strides and flung it open.  “Come on.”

“Wanna bet Grant finds us first?” Mac murmured as he followed.  Even with an eye out, it was a change in air pressure rather than any sound or glimpse of movement that alerted him when Grant slipped out from another corridor door and fell in just behind them.  Mac touched Pete’s arm in warning just as the insouciant voice called after them.

“Well, _Colonel_ Thornton!  And your – colleague?  Guard dog?  Engineer?  Tame technician?”  Mac and Pete turned to face the smirking subaltern.  “And how _is_ the weather in Washington, DC at the moment?”

Pete met his look with bland calm.  “Forty-eight degrees.  Don’t you take notes?”

“ ** _Grant_** _._ ”  All three men started, and Grant nearly jumped; no-one had noticed Major Walsh’s approach.  Grant recovered quickly and saluted.

“Go play in traffic.”

As Grant retreated, Pete started to speak, but Walsh held up a hand.  “I apologize, gentlemen.  Please understand.  He’s good at his job . . . but he _is_ a prat.”

“Kathleen, we’ve – ”

Walsh gestured again.  “Please.  Won’t you come along to where we can talk?  All three of us, and just the three.  I know, Peter, I should have leveled with you on Day One – ”

“Try Day Minus-One.”

Walsh nodded.  “True enough.  I had my reasons.  Probably not very good reasons . . . but I’m generally obliged to do my best with second-rate material.  I’ve grown used to it.”

She led them to a small, well-stocked private conference room with a table, half a dozen comfortable chairs, walls that looked convincingly soundproofed, and a windowless door that locked.  Pete and Mac each made their own swift appraisal of the interior; their glances met in the same beat.

“Good enough for you this time, Mac?”

“Yup.”

As the two men took their seats, Walsh dropped a stack of dossiers on the table in front of them, all bearing assorted security clearance stamps.  MacGyver picked up the top folder, which was prominently labeled ‘Thornton’ and obviously well-thumbed.  Pete took the next one in the stack, noting that it showed none of the same signs of recent or extensive handling.

“You got Pete’s weight wrong,” Mac remarked after a moment’s perusal.

“Too high, or too low?”  Walsh inquired.

“Guess.”

Pete turned a page in the ‘MacGyver’ dossier and cleared his throat.  “And you’ve also got Mac’s shoe size incorrect.”

“ _Shoe size_ – Peter, those dossiers don’t _have_ shoe sizes in them – ”

“Well, why not?”  Pete’s mouth twitched as Mac tried to hid his own grin behind the folder he held.  Walsh sank into her chair as the stiff atmosphere in the room melted.  “All right, Kathleen, enough.  What’s all this about?”

_It was about terrorism._

_It was about bombs, and bloodbaths, and blood feuds, and blood money, and the kind of bone-deep hatred that just never lets up.  It was about the kind of mess that you get when packs of killers start tearing each other apart like rabid dogs, and you can’t get anywhere close to them or they’ll all start tearing at you._

_It was about the most reckless thing I’d ever heard Pete asked to do, and I couldn’t believe he said yes._

“’Tisn’t just that the Unionists are up in arms over this so-called Agreement – there’s rumors of more fractures building up within the IRA _and_ the Provisional IRA.  We’ve got breakaway paramilitary units and splinter groups and rogue cells and bloody-minded opportunists with short fuses and long memories.  I swear everyone in Ireland has a grudge against somebody . . . and they’re all thirsty for more guns and more money.”

Pete was frowning over a report.  “And you’re certain the funding is coming from America?  From private citizens?”

“Where else?  We’ve been sending our best blood overseas for centuries.  For every living soul in Ireland today, there are ten abroad, and they have far more money and even less sense.  For years now the IRA have been targeting the sentimental fools of the US and Canada for cash cows.  That’s where you come in, Peter.”

MacGyver broke in, speaking for the first time in several minutes.  “Y’know, I just looked through this dossier you’ve got on Pete, and I didn’t see ‘sentimental fool’ anywhere.  Did I miss it?” _  
_

“ _Jaysus_ , MacGyver, if you think I meant that you haven’t been listening.”

“Oh, I’ve been listening.  And what I’m hearing is that you want to use Pete as bait.”

Mac was glowering at her in angry frustration – frustration that was worse because, somehow, she wasn’t glaring back.  Instead she shook her head ruefully and turned to Pete.

“Peter, have you any notion at all just how damned lucky you are to have this man at your back?”

“I’d say I have a very good notion.  And you haven’t answered his question.”

“No more I haven’t, true.  But by God, I’d give anything to have just _one_ man on my staff – or anywhere in this bloody province! – that I could count on like that.”  She turned to MacGyver, whose glower hadn’t wavered, and met his gaze squarely.  “No, not bait – it’s the smell of American dollars that’s the bait.  I want Peter for the hook.”

“The hook?”

“All right!  I’ve already admitted that I set up the symposium to bring him here – and got yourself into the bargain! – not but what it was a good enough idea on its own.  But I _did_ choose you, Peter, out of a stack of possibilities and a fleeting hope.  You’ve got the background in intelligence and the experience in field operations that I need.  But more than that, you’re clean.  You’re not part of the system here.”

Mac glanced at Pete and saw the pained expression on his face.  “It’s really that bad, then?” Pete said.

“Worse.  If this place were any more corrupt . . . I’ve an intelligence service that’s too alien to pass for anything but an invading army, a police force that’s just as sectarian as the terrorists I’m supposed to be fighting, a justice system that’s an entrenched oxymoron, and enforcement that’s rotten to the core with dependence on informers and supergrasses.  Half the convictions we win these days will collapse given a good kick.  And I can only trust my own assistant because he’s too much of a prig to cross me.”

MacGyver passed Pete a quick, scrawled note:  _So what’s the difference between a prig and a prat?_   Pete gave him an annoyed look and stuffed the note into a pocket.

“The supergrass system has spooked the Provisional IRA to the point that we’re finally seeing less violence on a daily basis . . . but with the new Anglo-Irish Agreement, most of Belfast is primed for rioting.  I’m supposed to stop the next escalation before it starts.  I _need_ some solid intelligence.”

Pete was nodding.  “And this contact you say you’ve got – Mary O’Sullivan – do you trust her?”

“Implicitly.  She’s the one solid resource I’ve got, but I _have_ to protect her, keep her cover secure – at any cost.”

 _Any cost?_   Mac ground his teeth at the implication, wondering why Pete seemed to have missed it.  He broke in again.  “If she’s your best source, the one you’re counting on to make this work – why don’t you have a dossier on her?”

Walsh looked from Mac to Pete in puzzlement.  “Her dossier?  It’s right here.”  Walsh picked up a buff folder and handed it across the table.  “Read it and weep.”

Pete blinked at the name on the label:  _Máire Ui Súilleabháin._   “Kathleen . . . just how do you get ‘Mary O’Sullivan’ out of _that_?”

Walsh snorted.  “Put it through a fine mesh and strain out all the extraneous vowels.”  Pete raised an eyebrow, and MacGyver filched the file from him and studied it as Walsh continued.  “Look, it’s all part of the whole romantic Nationalist Celtic heritage business – some of them _will_ go back to the oldest, most cluttered Gaelic spelling they can dredge up out of the old records.  But don’t blame Máire.  It was her husband changed the name, and she’s stuck with it now.”

Pete shifted his chair to read over MacGyver’s shoulder.  “Mac, that book you were reading on the plane – ”

“Yeah.  Padraig Ui Súilleabháin.  I wasn’t gonna even _try_ to pronounce it without a native guide.”  Mac glanced up at Walsh.  “Any relation?”

“Patrick O’Sullivan.  That was her husband.”

“ _Was_?  But the book was only just released – ”

“Posthumously.  It’s all in there . . . she saw it through to publication after he was gunned down in the street eighteen months back.  After she’d got out of hospital herself, that is.  She was walking beside him when he was killed.”

“Which side shot them?”

Walsh shrugged.  “He’d been writing some very candid articles for the press, and three different groups crowed and claimed responsibility.”

“You want Pete to risk his life on the word of somebody with a grudge?”

Walsh bristled, and her dark eyes flashed; Mac noted with interest that it was a stronger reaction than any she’d shown yet, in spite of his needling.  “If she is, she’s a right – she wasn’t hit herself when they shot Padraig.  She was carrying their first child, and she lost it from the shock.  Since then . . . well, the book’s all well and good, but even before she could sit up again she was on fire to do more, and still is.”  She looked from Pete’s considering frown to MacGyver’s unconvinced scowl.  “You can trust her – I do.”

Pete took the dossier from MacGyver and studied the photo on the inside cover.  Máire Ui Súilleabháin was in her mid-forties, but her dark brown hair already showed streaks of grey and deep lines were etched in her face.  He realized she was probably a contemporary of Walsh’s, although hardship had left her looking considerably older than her years.  “So she’s Catholic, but anti-IRA?”

“She’s anti- _conflict_.”

“Well, that sure makes a difference,” MacGyver grumbled.

“Believe it or not, it does,” Walsh retorted.  “We could do with more of it.  And we could do with more like her.”

“You seem to know her very well,” Pete remarked.  “Known her for long?”

“We go back to university together.”  Mac looked at her sharply, but Pete only nodded.

“Look, Peter.  Is it so much I’m asking you to do?  You know what we’re up against . . . if I could just get some solid information on the splinter groups, I might be able to keep a step ahead of them.  I’m damned if I know whether Ireland has even a prayer of hope for any real peace someday . . . for today, I’ll settle for a few less killings than otherwise.  And you _are_ Irish, Peter, aren’t you – Irish-American?”

“Well, yes, but I don’t really know the details – ”

“That’s just it.  You fit the profile of what they look for – that kind of fuzzy notion of heritage is what they glom on to.  All we need is to get them pointed at you, and we can do that in a few days if you’re game for sticking around.  I can clear out at least one nest of vipers and maybe pick up some threads that’ll lead to more.”

_Yeah.  Everyone knows what terrorists look like.  Where they live . . . how they talk, how they dress, what religion they follow._

_How they’re different from anyone you know.  And they’re crazy.  
_

_About as crazy as Pete had to be to agree to any of this._

_So what could I do but agree to stick around too?_

-


	4. Connection

__  
**Four: Connection**  


 

“Don’t you ever knock?”

Pete was looking out the window of his new hotel room and didn’t glance up when MacGyver slipped in, although he knew he had locked the door.

“You weren’t tailed from the airport.”  Mac looked around the modest room.  “Hey, not bad.  Not as fancy as the last one, but it’s cozier.”  The new hotel was far downscale from Pete’s elegant suite in the Europa Hotel where the symposium attendees had been lodged.

“Good.”  Pete turned away from the view of gritty rain-soaked evening streets with a satisfied nod.  “With any luck, nobody will connect the British Army’s recently departed VIP guest with the Irish-American tourist who just caught a cab from the main airport.”  Pete had changed his tailored suit for an old tweed jacket and well-worn flat cap; for someone planning to bluff out a band of hardened killers, MacGyver thought he looked almost indecently relaxed.

“So what now?”

“Kathleen thinks it will take a few days for this Máire Ui Súilleabháin to set up the contact – I think she has to work through several layers so as not to blow her own cover.  Meanwhile, I settle in, play tourist, see the sights, keep out of trouble, and stay away from Shankill Road.”

“Yeah, I know.  Don’t walk down the wrong street, stop on the wrong corner, hail the wrong cab, go into the wrong pub, and for God’s sake don’t order the wrong drink.”

“What?”

“Whatever you do, _don’t_ order a Black and Tan.”

“Mac, what’s eating you?”

“Pete, did you know Mark Thompson was out here just last month?”  Pete nodded.  “He lasted two days.  We don’t even know which side shot him.”

“Thompson didn’t have anyone watching his back.”

“ _Pete_ – ”

“Mac, not another _word_ about walking away from this.  It’s too important.  And you’re the last person to try and tell _me_ that something’s too dangerous.”

MacGyver looked up suddenly from where he was fiddling with an old-fashioned clock on a side table.  “Pete, what’s happened to your instincts?  You’re about to walk blindfolded into a snake pit . . . and you’re _enjoying_ this.”  He set down the clock and straightened up.  “Just how big a promotion are they plannin’ for you?  Are they gonna dump you behind a big polished desk where you won’t get to come out into the field and play operative any more?”

Mac saw Pete’s face shutter.  _Oh, great.  I triggered the stone wall._ _Pushed too hard and said too much._

It was a long moment before Pete answered, and then he simply shrugged.  “Look, I’m not admitting to anything . . . but it feels good to get away from the suits once in a while.  I’d’ve thought that you’d understand that.”

Mac picked up the clock again and tapped at its face with a thumbnail.  “Yeah.  I do.”

“You don’t have a monopoly on the dangerous side of this business, you know.”  Pete picked up his still-unpacked suitcase and heaved it onto the bed.

“Okay, okay, I get it.  You can’t blame me for worrying.”  Mac set the clock down again and sighed, looking at Pete apologetically.  “And you’re right.  Who says I get all the fun?”

“ _Fun . . ._?  Well, yeah.  I guess.”  Pete opened the suitcase and began to sort through the neatly folded clothes.  “So what are you going to do with yourself for the next few days?  We can’t be seen together.”

In spite of his anxiety, Mac found himself grinning.  It was a new country, a new game, and a new set of rules to figure out.  “I’ll think of something.”

“Well, don’t get yourself killed in the meanwhile.”

“I’ll try.”

“And look, it’s not like we’re behind the Iron Curtain,” Pete continued.  “The government isn’t trying to kill or deport us – ”

“Makes a nice change.”

“– the electricity and plumbing work consistently, the food’s recognizable, and there’s no language barrier.”

Mac winced.  “Oh, trust me, Pete.  There’s a language barrier.  It’s just a different kinda language.”

Pete had to admit that the pub had atmosphere . . . unfortunately, the atmosphere wasn’t breathable.  He could feel his senses of smell and taste shriveling under the assault of the dense clouds of nicotine from dozens of raw, unfiltered cigarettes.  _At least it doesn’t make me want to start smoking again.  Just the reverse._

He hadn’t cared for the pub as a rendezvous in the first place, but it hadn’t been his decision.  The Provisionals chose the meeting place, and this was their choice.  Belfast was full of pubs; Pete supposed they could meet for years without ever using the same location twice.  Or perhaps not – from Kathleen’s remarks, there was a strict territorial code, and it was as much as a man’s life was worth to be found drinking in the wrong neighborhood.

Pete didn’t like the pub, and he didn’t like the feel of the crowd:  too many sullen faces, too many hooded eyes and sidelong glances.  Everyone seemed to be watching the exits and tallying arrivals and departures.  As he threaded his way through the tables he caught fragments of conversation, mostly political discussion, always laced with obscenity and edged with bitter rage.

He didn’t want to face a meeting with the IRA without backup, and he couldn’t imagine how MacGyver was going to manage his end of the business.  True, the man was three-quarters chameleon and Pete had seen him disappear into the most unlikely backgrounds.  But compared to this chilly, smoky, tense room, the kasbahs and souks of the Middle East seemed cozy and homelike.

_How is a man who doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink, and doesn’t even swear going to blend in with a crowd like this?_

Still fretting over MacGyver, Pete headed for the bar, where the owner, a pretty blonde woman with a carrying voice, was haranguing the stooped back of her nearly invisible assistant, who was busy at something under the bar.

“If you can’t get it fixed before the next wave of regulars come in, we’re fucked,” she groaned.  “The damned thing was workin’ not half an hour ago . . . do your best, will ye just?  I’ve got to get something down the throats of Mick’s boys or we won’t get a lick of music out of them and the crowd will fuckin’ kill us all.”  She pushed out from behind the bar with a trayful of pint glasses and vanished into a wall of smoke and profanity.  Pete watched her go, still uneasy.

Behind him, a familiar voice drawled from behind the bar, “Hey, Yank.  Whaddaya drinkin’?”

Pete spun around.  “ ** _Mac!_**  What . . . are you _doing_ back there?”

MacGyver lounged against the bar behind the taps, looking completely natural and at home in a buff bartender’s apron over his black jeans and T-shirt.  “Oh, just the usual . . . meetin’ new people, makin’ friends . . . learning new skills.  Noreen just taught me the fine art of building a Guinness.  Want one?”

Pete relaxed and laughed.  “That’s handy – if your current boss ever fires you, at least you’ll always have something to fall back on.”

Mac grinned.  “I don’t think so.  I like my day job pretty well.”

The blonde materialized at Mac’s elbow.  “Have I got another Yank on my hands, so?  Do you two know each other?”

Mac draped an arm over her shoulders; the top of her head barely reached his chin.  “Noreen, I told you, America’s a big place.  We don’t _all_ know each other out there . . . ”

“Never mind that.  Why’s he still waitin’ for his drink?  Come on, come on, let’s see you do it right this time.”  Noreen turned to Pete.  “Can you believe it?  Hands like that, he can fix anything you’ve a mind to, and he’s never tended bar in his life.  What the fuck are they after out there in America, wastin’ such talents?” She spun back to Mac, leaving Pete feeling breathless.  “Will the taps hold out for the evening?”

“For now, but I told you, the equipment’s old and it can only be coaxed along so far before it just gets tired.”

“Fuck that.”  Pete saw the trace of a wince pass over Mac’s face.  “Just get me through tonight and I’ll fuckin’ worry about it tomorrow, as long as we’re all alive to see the day.”  She glanced anxiously at the door, slipped out from under Mac’s arm and hurried down the bar to where a new surge of patrons were clamoring for attention.

MacGyver was busy at the taps.  “Funny thing, Pete.  This is a nice big city, but you’d think it was a small town.  Everyone knows everything that’s going on, and nobody’s talkin’ about any of it.  You just soak it in through your pores.”  He handed Pete a pint of Guinness, the top a perfection of froth.  “I hope you like this stuff.  Are you supposed to drink it or chew it?”

Pete shrugged as he took the glass.  “Both, I think.”  His next remark was eclipsed by a sudden agitation in the room.  At one end of the pub, the men were pushing chairs and tables back to clear a space, musical instruments were pulled out of cases, and suddenly the entire crowd was roaring in hoarse unison.

 _Up a long ladder and down a short rope,_  
_To Hell with King Billy and God bless the Pope,_  
_If that doesn’t do it we’ll tear them in two . . ._

“Is that the band warming up, or an incitement to riot?” Pete murmured under the din.

“Both, I think.”  Mac bent over the taps, adding softly, “Head’s-up on your left – don’t look.  Rough-lookin’ character heading this way.”

The man was clean-shaven, sandy-haired and tall, nearly as tall as MacGyver, and massively built, with a heavy stride.  Pete recognized him from Walsh’s files:  Connor Kelly, head of the IRA cell they were targeting, a self-contained unit believed to be on the verge of splintering from the Provisional IRA.  The dossier had detailed his record but had failed to convey the aura of barely checked rage that seeped from his skin.  Pete noticed that as Connor made his way through the crowded room, other patrons glanced up and nodded at him but did not attempt to talk, and many of them shifted inconspicuously sideways out of his direct path.

Noreen had materialized beside Mac at the taps.  “For fuck’s sake, what’s Barking Connor doin’ here tonight?” she muttered.  “Serve him quick and don’t give him any guff.”

“‘Barking’ Connor?”  Mac murmured as he reached for more glasses.

“And _don’t_ call him that where he can hear it.  He’s barking mad, so he is.”

“No sense of humour, huh?”

“Hush you!”

Connor reached the bar and leaned over it, almost touching shoulders with Pete, who glanced over at him as if only just noticing the new arrival.  Mac gave the man a broad smile.

“Hiya, friend.  What’re you drinkin’?”

Connor glared at MacGyver.  “Noreen, what’s this gobshite Yank doin’ behind the taps?”

“Buildin’ you a Guinness,” Noreen snapped.  “Are you going to be payin’ for your drink tonight or am I chalkin’ it all up til the Cause?”

“Chalk it up and I’ll settle next week.”  Connor was still eyeing MacGyver.  With a sudden burst of speed startling in a man of his size, he lashed out and seized Mac’s left hand with a sudden jerk that pulled him up against the inside of the bar, twisting Mac’s wrist sharply backwards and catching the thumb in a lock that nearly dislocated it.  MacGyver caught back a gasp of pain and gritted his teeth.  “I _said_ , what the fuck is this Yank doin’ here?”

“For fuck’s sake, Connor, let him go!  You break his hand and I’m down a bartender for the night!”

Connor leered at her.  “ _Bartender_ , so he is?  What’s a fuckin’ Yankee tourist need with tendin’ bar in a dive like this?”

Mac sucked in his breath as the pressure on his hand increased.  “Hey, lighten up, will ya?”  He glanced at Noreen and leaned towards Connor confidentially.  “C’mon, gimme a break.  My money isn’t lasting the way I thought it would, and Noreen said she could pay me under the table, y’know?  She even said the musicians might let me sit in with them later on . . . and,” Mac tried to keep his voice even as Connor’s fingers tightened, “I can’t do that if you break my thumb.”

Connor’s eyes narrowed.  He lifted MacGyver’s hand and studied the ends of the fingers.  Mac held his breath; there hadn’t been much time for music in the last few frenetic years, and the once-heavy callouses that had marked the ends of his fingers, the stigmata of the guitarist, were now thin and faded.

But the marks were still visible.  Connor sniffed.  “Guitar, is it now?”  MacGyver nodded.  “Haven’t been playin’ much lately, so you haven’t.”

Mac shrugged his right shoulder, careful not to add to the pressure on his left hand.  “Well, okay, I’m a little out of practice . . . my guitar’s been in storage since my last move . . . ”

“ _Storage_?”  Suddenly Connor had released Mac’s hand and was roaring with contemptuous laughter.  “In hock, more like!  Watch yourself, Noreen.  Give this one an inch and he’ll be sleepin’ on your sofa till his visa runs dead.  Now where’s my fuckin’ drink?”

MacGyver set a Guinness within Connor’s reach and quickly and deliberately withdrew his hand.  Connor roared again, picked up the glass and turned to Pete for the first time.  “I don’t know you, either.  Are you a Yank too?”

Pete half turned and gave him a long look, propping one elbow up on the bar.  Mac saw Pete was wearing his ‘tough guy’ expression – he’d seen hoods from LA to Leningrad recognize a common soul in that face.  “Yeah, I’m an American.  You got a problem with that?”

“Now, that depends.  D’ye know this culchie?”

“Hardly,” Pete said.  “We only just met.  I’m from Chicago.  He isn’t.”  He leaned closer to Connor.  “Just between you and me, I think he’s one of those knee-jerk pacifists from California.  Know what I mean?”

“And you’re not, I take it?”

“Lemme put it this way – everything _I_ ever had I’ve had to fight for.”

Connor smiled suddenly and extended a broad hand.  “Now, that’s spoken like a man!  ‘Tis glad I am to meet you.  Connor Kelly.”

“Pete Thornton.”  When they shook, there was a harsh testing pressure to the handshake; Pete gave as good as he got and saw the startled sparkle in the other man’s eyes at the strength in the grip.

“And are you waitin’ for anyone?  Or would you have time for some craic with me boys?”

“Your . . . boys?”

Connor jerked his head towards a table in the corner.  “Come and have a talk with us.”

MacGyver watched Pete go and tried not to show his anxiety.  He could guess what it had cost Pete to remain impassively watching while Connor was on his rampage, but it had paid off.  Everything was going as well as it might . . . and even Connor, for all his bullying and posing, was less of a terror than a warning.

_Sure, everyone knows what terrorists look like.  What color hair they have.  Skin color, eye color, beards . . . They’re different from anyone you know.  Except these guys look like . . . well, just anyone._

Mac glanced at the table where Pete was now taking his seat beside two other men he recognized from Walsh’s files, Kevin Kelly and Liam Doherty.  Connor’s brother Kevin was a blurred younger copy from the same mold, while Liam was half a head shorter and a generation older, with wiry reddish hair thinning on top and going to grey.

Mac had noticed Liam’s arrival ten minutes earlier – it would have been difficult not to notice, not when the senses were keyed up to watch for danger.  Connor’s progress through the crowd had been marked by the patrons quietly sidestepping; but when Liam walked through the door, the ripple that ran through the crowd was broader and far more chilling.  People got well out of his way.  The table Liam selected had emptied as he approached, although the men sitting there had looked like being settled in for the evening.

And now Pete was entrenched at the same table, deep in conversation – or, rather listening intently with the air that MacGyver knew had an almost magical effect.  He didn’t doubt that the men at the table were talking more expansively than they had ever intended, detailing more of their thoughts and plans than they ever realized.

 _Man, he’s good.  I only hope I’ll be that good someday.  If we both live to get that far_ . . .

The pub was getting noisier, easy cover for any conversation.  At the far end of the room, the band started a new song and the crowd bellowed the chorus in harsh, belligerent unison.

 _Come out, you Black-and-Tans,_  
_Come out and fight me like a man . . ._

In all his reading, Mac hadn’t missed that the most common reason for an IRA murder was taking down a suspected informer.

_Kathleen Walsh, are you setting us up?_

_-  
_


	5. Navigation

_**Five: Navigation** _

 

Pete was awake, dressed and ready long before the 8 o’clock briefing they’d scheduled in his hotel room the next morning.  He wasn’t ready for the heaven-sent aroma of coffee and pastry that greeted him when he opened the door to Kathleen’s knock, or for the lines of worry in her face.  She was alone and in civilian clothes, her short brown hair netted with beads of dampness.  This late in November, the sun was only just rising at this hour, and Belfast was wrapped in a chilly fog that didn’t look likely to clear up any time soon.

“You’re all right then, thank God.”

“We’re both fine.  Isn’t Grant with you?”

“Grant?  Are you mad?  Even in mufti he’d show up like a maiden aunt at a fair.”  Kathleen glanced around the room as she entered and saw MacGyver sprawled on the couch.  Mac looked more than a little disheveled, but neither man was visibly damaged, and Pete looked bright-eyed and well-rested.  “How did it go?”

“Not too bad.  MacGyver came in for a bit of harassment, but no harm done.”

“It made a pretty good icebreaker,” Mac remarked.

Kathleen studied him.  “Nothing broken other than ice?  You’re looking a bit of the stray cat.”

Mac shrugged and reached for the coffee.  Pete regarded him thoughtfully; MacGyver had arrived only ten minutes ahead of Kathleen, unshaven and noncommittal about where he’d been during the rest of the night, but there had been no time to inquire further.  Pete gulped his own coffee gratefully and turned his attention to the matter at hand.

“How long do you think it will take Máire to set up contact with the next group?”

They were discussing possibilities for the next step, and how far they might be able to extend the probe to other factions, when the phone rang.  MacGyver, who had remained dourly uninvolved in the discussion, reached to answer it and checked himself.  Since Pete was the only official occupant of the room, it wouldn’t do for someone else to answer.

Pete picked up the receiver on the second ring.  “Yeah?  Oh.  Lieutenant.  Yes, she’s here.”  He held out the phone to Kathleen.  “It’s Grant.”

Both men were watching the Major as she listened to the distant voice, and saw the wave of glacial whiteness wash across her face.  Mac spotted her knees beginning to shake and slid off the couch to push a chair up close behind her, and Pete caught her elbow and guided her down.  She seemed barely aware of either man as the call rang off.

Kathleen put down the phone with a hand that shook so hard she missed the cradle; Pete caught the receiver as it started to slide away.

“Máire Ui Súilleabháin has gone missing.  No-one’s seen her since early this morning.”  Her voice was flat and dead.  “The bastards must have her.”

 

 _There’s a saying, ‘Careful what you wish for – you just might get it.’  
_

 _The more time I’d spent on the streets of Belfast, the more I’d wanted Pete off them, safe out of reach of the IRA, the UVF, the RUC, and every other pack of homicidal lettermen from Enniskillen to Carrickfergus.  Now, with our key contact compromised, Pete’s cover was probably blown and he was off the streets all right – but I had to go right back out onto them.  
_

 _Major Walsh was panicking and pretending not to . . . and I had an idea where to start looking._

 

 

 _Noreen Gallagher and her family lived all crowded into a little flat above the pub off of Divis Street, in the Falls Road neighborhood.  It would’ve been even more cramped if their parents had still been around; but it was just Noreen riding herd on four younger siblings.  When the kids weren’t in school, everyone – even the youngest – worked in the pub to support another sister who was finishing up a medical degree in the States.  Noreen had dropped out of college herself several years back to make it all happen – but if she resented any of it, she didn’t let on._

 _With everyone keeping such late hours, there were no early risers; they’d all been sound asleep that morning when I’d slipped away.  But it had taken me a while to find some of the things I needed, and I was pretty sure they’d be stirring well before I got back._

 

The alley behind the row of buildings housing the pub and its neighbors was far too narrow for cars, but the motorbike slipped through easily.  The first thing MacGyver saw when he pulled up was the youngest boy, Bobby, playing in the areaway behind the block of buildings, too intent to pay heed to the approaching cycle.  It was a moment before Mac spotted what he was doing, and the blood rushed to his head:  the child, armed with a homemade slingshot, was taking a careful bead on one of the seagulls that were investigating the rubbish bins in the alley.

“Hey, _whoa!_ ”  MacGyver was off the bike and striding over to Bobby as the gull squawked its annoyance and flapped away.  Mac plucked the slingshot from the boy’s hand and extracted the ammunition:  instead of the pebble he’d been expecting, it turned out to be a spent shotgun cartridge.  He dropped the heavy shell as if it had burned his fingers.

“Bobby, what’re you doing?  I didn’t fix this for you so you could turn around and kill wild creatures with it.”

The boy scowled.  “Are ye coddin’ me?  ‘Tis a feckin’ seagull just.  What of it?”

Mac made himself take a deep breath before he answered.  _I’m gettin’ used to that inside-out way of talking.  I could even get used to the cussing.  No way am I **ever** gonna get used to a ten-year-old who’s that callous about killing.  I don’t **want** to get used to it.  _ “Well, _look_ at them,” he said at last, gesturing to the rest of the flock, which had begun to swoop back down towards the bins.  “They’re alive, they’re free, they’re beautiful.  Wouldn’t you like to be able to fly like that?”

“And live on garbage?”

“It isn’t garbage to them.  They can live on what we throw away.  It’s not like they’re competing with you for food – and you don’t need to hunt them to eat.”

“Eat seagulls?  That’s disgustin’!”

“Not if you were hungry enough.”

Bobby studied the gulls thoughtfully, but looked far from convinced.  With a sigh, Mac slipped the slingshot into his jacket pocket.  “Is Matt awake?”

The child sniffed with fraternal contempt.  “Still dead til the world.”

MacGyver nodded.  Matthew, the oldest boy at fifteen, had not returned home until well after four in the morning, long after the rest of the exhausted household had been quiet.  Mac was counting on him still being asleep.  “I need to speak to your sister.  Where is she?”

“Which one?  Dearbhla and Molly are in the kitchen and Noreen’s in the taproom.”

“Noreen.”

“And are ye sure ye want to be speakin’ with herself?”

“Why not?”

Bobby gave him a sidelong look.  “When we woke up this mornin’ and you were gone, Noreen said she allowed as we wouldn’t be seein’ you again.”

“Well, she was wrong, big guy.  I just had some errands I had to run.  C’mon, you can soften her up for me.”

“Can I have my catapult back?”

“Later – after the gulls are outta range.”

 

“Noreeeeen . . . ”

“Jaysus, Bobby, didn’t I tell you to play outside if it wasn’t too wet?  Is it after rainin’ again already . . .?”  Her voice trailed off when she saw MacGyver.  “Bobby, if you must be inside go see if Matty’s stirrin’ himself yet.  Tell Dearbhla I said you can have a biscuit now.”  The child slipped away as she straightened up from behind the taps.  When she looked at Mac, her expression was guarded rather than welcoming.  “Well, what about ye?”

“What about what?”

“When I saw the sofa empty this morning, I didn’t know if you’d be showin’ your face around here again.”

MacGyver glanced towards the doorway to make sure they weren’t being overheard by any of the younger kids.  The couch had not been Noreen’s first suggestion of a place to spend the night, and keeping her at arm’s length hadn’t been easy – doing so tactfully, against his own inclinations, had been even harder, and didn’t look like getting any easier with practice.  He leaned over the bar across from where she’d been working, not quite close enough to touch.  “So were you down here checking the cashbox, or counting the silverware?”

Noreen tried to repress a smile at his ingenuous look, but in the end she shook her head and laughed.  “Neither, damn your eyes.  I was moanin’ over the fu – over the _damned_ taps.”

Mac nodded and set several paper-wrapped parcels on the bar.  “It took me a while to scrounge the parts I needed.  But I also brought something for breakfast.  Or lunch.  Depending.”  He pushed one bag towards Noreen; it fell over and half a dozen oranges rolled out.  He grinned with satisfaction as her eyes sparkled – as he had guessed, fresh fruit must be a rarity for them, especially in winter.  “So where’s the toolbox?  I thought I left it right here last night.”

Noreen turned her attention to the glassware as MacGyver worked.  He waited several minutes before he asked, “So Matt hasn’t poked his nose out of bed yet?”

“No more he hasn’t.  I don’t suppose you might be knowin’ what time last night he finally rolled in?”

“Don’t you?”

“Now, if you aren’t bein’ one of those that’s better at asking questions than answerin’ them.”

“Am I?”  Mac glanced up from under the bar and grinned.  Noreen’s return smile lacked some of its previous light; the worry in her eyes overshadowed the warmth of the moment.  Mac worked for several more minutes, then set down the pliers he’d been using and stood up.

“Mind if I go have a word with him?”

 

In the tiny back bedroom Matthew shared with Bobby, all MacGyver could see was a lump under twisted shabby blankets.  Although it was now late morning, the November daylight was only feebly breaking through the fog and haze that wrapped the city.  The bedroom was as gloomy as if dusk had already fallen.  Mac snapped on the electric light, a single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, and was greeted by a groan of protest as the lump tried to burrow farther under the covers.

MacGyver picked his way through the cluttered room towards the bed.  None of the Gallaghers seemed to own much, but most of the space in the boys’ room not taken up by furniture was filled with instrument cases and the components of a basic sound system.  It felt like coming full circle.  Three days before, Matt had given Mac his first point of entry into the household, when he’d come upon the boy swearing desperately over a damaged speaker that was needed for a gig that night.

When you got right down to it, that was really the most constant thing in MacGyver’s constantly changing life:  no matter where he went in the world, there was always something that needed fixing.

Mac sat down on the end of the bed, suddenly and heavily, and Matt yelped and thrashed his way out from underneath.

“Ye bloody great eejit, that was my _foot_!”

“Was it?  Sorry about that.”

“Like hell ye are.”  Matt scrabbled his way out from under the covers, looking rumpled and bleary.  He was still wearing the clothes he’d had on the night before.  He blinked several times at Mac as if not quite sure who he was, then looked around uneasily.

“Noreen and the rest have been up for quite a while.  I think they were expecting a little help from you today – since you didn’t do much last night.”

Matt shook his head as if to get it working again, then sat up and tossed off the blankets, glowering sullenly at MacGyver.  “I’ll be along quick enough.  You can tell them that.”

“Oh, I think Noreen already knows without my telling her.”  Mac stood up but made no move to leave.  Instead, he looked around the room as if inventorying the equipment.

The boy gave Mac an anxious look, then shrugged and picked up a shoe from beside the bed.  “I’ll be right down . . . soon’s as I can.  Tell Noreen I’m sorry, I’ll make it up til her.”

The boy clearly wanted him to go, but instead MacGyver picked up a power cord that was lying in a tangle on the floor and began to run it through his hands, his sensitive fingers automatically checking for hidden breaks in the wires.  “How’s Colin’s amp holding up?”

Matt finally located his other shoe, far under the bed.  “Fine, but . . . well, he’s blown the other speaker now . . . I don’t suppose, well, that you could maybe fix that one too?”

“Depends.  I’d have to take a look at it.”  Mac coiled up the power cord neatly and secured the coil with a piece of string he’d found amongst the mess.

“That would be brilliant if you could – he’s another gig in three day’s time.”  Matt yanked his shoe on without bothering to untie and retie it.  “It’s late enough he’ll be awake, we can go see him right now.”

The boy’s nervousness was so transparent that Mac almost felt sorry for him.  Almost.

As Matt tried to slip past him towards the door, MacGyver put out a hand and blocked him with a flat palm against the chest.  The movement seemed casual, but the hollow slapping echo of the impact echoed very loudly in the tiny room.  It stopped the husky boy dead in his tracks.

“Where’s it stashed, Matt?”

“What?”

“Where is it?  Under the mattress?  In the closet?  You don’t have a whole lot of privacy here, not with a younger brother in such a small room, but you must have a pretty good hiding place.”

“What the fuck are you talkin’ about?”

“I’m talkin’ about the gun Connor gave you last night.  That was a real big important day in your life, wasn’t it?  Your very first gun, huh?”  Mac didn’t try to keep the contempt out of his voice.  “Does Noreen know you’ve joined the IRA?”

 _It wasn’t the first time I’d come face to face with a kid who, because of being born in the wrong year or even the wrong decade, in the wrong part of the globe, was all ready and set to grow up to be a terrorist.  A kid who just didn’t know anything else.  
_

 _It_ **was** _the first time that kid had looked exactly like the kids I grew up with – hair and face and eyes just like my friends’ – or, God help me, mine.  Going head to head with Matt was like looking into a distorting mirror at my own younger face, right down to the angry scowl and the sense of grievance – the frustrated rage that burns just under the skin with adolescent hormones for fuel.  I used to blow off that rage on the rink, and when I got busted up it got trapped inside.  
_

 _I didn’t want to know what Matt did with his._

“C’mon, Matt.  You were playing lookout for Connor and his merry band last night at the pub.  I watched you the whole time.  And I was awake and watching when you got in last night – although I haven’t told Noreen just how late it was.”

“I was helpin’ the musicians.”

“Not last night you weren’t.”

Matt tried to knock MacGyver’s hand aside and push past, but Mac easily evaded the clumsy attempt and held his ground.  “Look, Matt, I know it’s hard.  Three older sisters and Noreen ruling the roost – and I bet Connor’s been feeding you some kind of macho garbage about becoming the man of the family, right?”

The boy bristled.  “You can’t tell me what to do, you – you – you fuckin’ gobshite Yankee tourist!”

“That’s Connor talking.  Haven’t you got anything of your own to say?”

Matt’s fierce blue eyes blazed.  “You can’t possibly understand what it’s about!  This is for freedom, and Ireland, and – and – it’s time we pushed the fuckin’ Proddies out and took back what’s ours.  There’s been too much blood shed to back down now!  If we don’t fight, who will?”

MacGyver made a face.  “Man, is that the best Connor can do?  I suppose it lost something in translation, but that’s awful lame even for rabble-rousing.  But he’s right on a couple of things – if you don’t fight, maybe nobody will, and you can stop shedding blood, ‘cause there _has_ been too much.”

“For fuck’s sake, you just _don’t get it_!”  Matt pulled himself away, slipped under Mac’s arm and was off into the hallway and down the back stairs, MacGyver on his heels.  Mac caught him by the elbow as they both reached the ground floor.

“You left your shiny new gun behind, Matt.  What’s Connor gonna do if you turn up without it?  Give you another one?”

“For fuck’s sake, Yank, do you have the first idea just how many guns there are in Northern Ireland?  Are you thinkin’ you can disarm the whole fuckin’ province?”

“You know, just for the record, my name isn’t ‘Yank’.  My friends call me Mac.”

“ _Friends_?”  Matt’s voice cracked on the word, and he turned scarlet with adolescent fury.

“Yeah, that’s right.  Friends.  Noreen _doesn’t_ know, does she?”  Matt shook his head violently.  “She’ll be mad as anything if she finds out.”  Matt nodded just as vigourously.  “Well, if we get rid of it, maybe she won’t have to.”

“I can’t do that,” Matt choked.  “Not for Noreen, not for you, not for anybody living.  There’s been too much already . . . ”

Mac spoke more softly, knowing he was aiming for a raw nerve.  “Matt, is this about your dad?  It won’t bring him back, you know.”

Matt’s face went from crimson to white, and his expression froze into stone.  _Okay, bull’s-eye, but now what?_  Matthew Gallagher Senior had been beaten to death in the Maze Prison, and the family assumed he’d died at the hands of the authorities; MacGyver had learned that on his first evening with Noreen’s family.  _The worst part is, you’re right, and I can’t tell you that._

“Look, Matt, you know that rhyme everyone was bellowing at the pub last night?  The one about the ladder?”

“You mean ‘Up a long ladder and down a short rope’?  What about it?”

“Well, it’s like this.  It can take a long time getting to the point where you have to make the final choice about violence, about killing.  But once you’re there, it’s _over_.  There’s nowhere to go but down.  There’s _nothing_ after that except killing and death.  Is that where you want to end up?”

“You don’t fuckin’ know what you’re talkin’ about, **_Yank_**!”  Matt tore himself loose and bolted again; before MacGyver could catch up with him, he’d shoved the back door open and was out into the back alley.  He swung the door hard shut behind him, and Mac had to stop and catch it before it slammed into his face.

The moment’s delay was enough to give Matt a head start.  That was all the boy needed.  It was almost noon, but the fog that choked the streets under the overcast sky deepened the gloom and played tricks on the eyes.  Mac tried to follow and see where Matt had gone, but the boy knew the streets far too well.  The foggy shadows swallowed him without a trace before Mac had gone half a block.

MacGyver stood in agitated frustration in the back lane, clenching and unclenching his fingers for a long minute as if he could still reach out to the angry fugitive, before he went back inside.

 

During the running argument, Mac hadn’t had time to worry about whether they might have been overheard; but the first thing he saw when he opened the door was Noreen standing in the shadows at the foot of the stairs.  She spoke before he had a chance to catch his breath and collect his thoughts.

“He’s gotten in with that lot, hasn’t he?”

“I tried to talk to him . . . he’s gone.  I lost him.”

Even before he saw her clearly, MacGyver was certain that she knew what he really meant.  The gut feeling was confirmed when she stepped out under the harsh light of the bare bulb that lit the hallway and he saw what she held in her hand.

Noreen must already know Matt’s pet hiding places to have found the gun he’d been given so quickly.  She was holding the ugly snub-nosed pistol as if the mere touch were poisonous.  “That Matt – he does my head in, but what can I do?  I promized Da I’d look after him.”  Her eyes were shining with unshed tears, but her face was grim.  “And knowing Connor, ‘tis a dirty piece.”  She set the gun down on a side table and wiped her palms as if she’d been handling filth.  “‘Tis this day I’ve been dreadin’ since Mam died.  Mac, what am I going to do?”

“Do you know Máire Ui Súilleabháin?”

Her blue eyes met his in confused surprise.  “Everyone does – well, everyone in the Falls.  Why?  How do _you_ know her?”

“How long since you last saw her?”

“I saw her for a moment yesterday afternoon, but just in passin’.  And we had some fine craic a few days past – just before you fetched up on my back step, come til that.”  Noreen drew closer to Mac and reached up a hand to touch his cheek.  “So – you didn’t land on my sofa by accident, did you now?”

Mac caught her hand gently in his own.  “No, I’m afraid not.”  He saw her eyes shutter and added, “I’m sorry.”

Noreen blinked, swallowed hard and shrugged.  “More’s the pity.  Give us six months and we might make a musician of you yet . . .  but you’ll not be stayin’.”

He shook his head.  “Look, Noreen.  Maybe everyone doesn’t know everything that goes on around here, but _someone_ must know something that might help.  _Who would know where Connor is?_ ”

Noreen’s face blanched, and Mac could feel her hand grow suddenly icy.  “For the love of holy Mother Church, _why_?”

“He’s got Máire.”

“Oh, _fuck_.”  Noreen saw Mac’s face twitch slightly at the obscenity, and in spite of herself she smiled faintly.  “Sorry, Yank.  You’re really not used til it, are you?”  She sighed and closed her eyes, and let her head fall against his chest.  “And if I tell you nothin’, you’ll be danderin’ about in even mingier corners, askin’ more bloody questions, and you’ll be gettin’ yourself shot sooner rather than later.”

He put an arm around her shoulders and waited.  After a moment, he heard her murmur,  “Conway’s.  Try Conway’s.”

“Conway’s . . . on Conway Street?”  His mind flashed back to the border, and the guard.  _I’ll remember that.  Count on it._

Noreen looked up and met his eyes again, and her gaze was suddenly frank and streetwise.  “Word is there was a tall Yank on a motorbike who covered for Kevin O’Hare when he shot his mouth off at the Armagh border last week.”

MacGyver’s eyes narrowed.  “Don’t tell me O’Hare is IRA . . . Noreen, _don’t tell me I helped a killer_.”

Noreen snorted and shook her head emphatically, and Mac breathed again.  “No, he’s just a hothead.  But he’s well-liked for all that.  He plays a mean concertina, so he does.  And he’s got a wife and six children, and there’d be the devil to pay if he was cashiered.”

She had wrapped an arm around his waist, holding on tightly; now she let him go.  “Brian Conway will know he owes you one.  And Brian Conway knows everything that happens in the Falls.”

 

 

 _Like I said, it’s the assumptions that really get you._

 _You assume that, in a city that’s a war zone, with army patrols on every corner and bombs going off and kids desperate to grow up and graduate to their first guns and their first murder, nobody’s got time for much beyond survival._

 _They sure aren’t gonna waste time on music, right?_

 _Wrong._

 _At Conway’s, they were hopping mad at Connor and ready to roll on him – Belfast has no shortage of empty and abandoned housing, but he’d taken over a private home a few days before and told the owner, Seán O’Boyle, to go stay with relatives till Connor felt like moving on.  But that wasn’t what made folks so mad.  No, it was that Connor was squatting in the local ‘seisiun’ house, where folks gathered to make music, and that was more than anyone could take lying down.  O’Boyle was a local fiddle champion who’d won the All-Ireland three times, and Connor had crossed a line that even trumped politics._

 _But they couldn’t tell the police._

 _They told Noreen.  Noreen told me._

 _And then everyone told me not to meddle – at least, that’s what I think they meant by “Don’t you be faffin’ about in Connor’s business or he’ll do worse than plant you a looter”.  Then they went back to drinking and arguing over what to do._

 _And I went back out onto the dim, foggy streets._

-


	6. Distraction

_**Six: Distraction** _

 

Pete could hear Kathleen’s voice well before he entered her operations room; her tirade was rising steadily in tone and volume as he approached the doorway.

“We are given ample notice of just which neighborhoods have been slated for civic rearrangement – we even know, _well_ in advance, which streets are due to be ripped out and bogged up, and when, and how far behind schedule each project is – can anyone give me one _damned_ excuse as to **why my fucking operational map isn’t up to date**!  **_Grant!_**   We’ve got half of Belfast pouring into the streets and this _bloody_ map doesn’t even show all the streets correctly!  And _don’t_ tell me the march won’t spill into the Catholic neighborhoods – if you’re going to believe that for one moment I’ll send you off to chase the Good Folk instead of the paramilitaries.”

In the bustle, Pete’s return to the ops center had so far gone unnoticed.  He took the opportunity to watch Walsh alternate between directing the activity and berating anyone who lagged behind her own breathlessly driven pace.  Her intensity was eerily familiar; he could recall any number of times when he’d thrown himself into the grip of that high-pitched fever, focusing on the immediate crises of coordinating an operation.  All the while, some intense lurking worry crouched just off to the side.  Ignoring the worry never got rid of it, but there was rarely any other option.

That was the hidden price to the priceless treasure of having a friend and colleague like MacGyver.  Pete often wondered which was worse:  the long weeks when Mac was off on assignment under someone else’s purview, when Pete had no idea where he was or what dangers he was surviving, or not; or the missions when Pete knew the dangers in detail and had to shoulder the responsibility of sending Mac out to face them.

Kathleen had certainly landed herself in the center of a whirlwind of distraction.  Pete had been out of the ops room for fifteen minutes at the most, but something had erupted in that time that seemed to have caught the attention of the entire British Army contingent stationed in Belfast.  He waited until she finished rattling off orders and walked up beside her as she bent over the large-scale map of the city that covered the center table, angrily making corrections in red pen to the blue lines of the streets.

“I leave to take a phone call and come back to find you deploying the troops.  If I take a lunch break, are you going to start a war while I’m gone?  What’s up?”  He glanced at the map.  “I heard you mention a march – is the IRA holding a parade?”

“Worse.  It’s the Loyalists.”  She glanced up at Pete’s face in time to see his expression become reflective, and smiled mirthlessly.  “I know that look, Yank.  You’re trying to remember which side is which.”

“Um, yeah – I’m afraid so.”

“The Loyalists are our side.  Supposedly.  Loyalist, Unionist – ” her voice took on a mincing tone – “the pro-British Protestant majority, who are now solidly unified indeed in their common sense of self-righteous rage, all terminally pissed at the Crown that has rewarded their loyalty by signing a pact to sell them all out to the Devil and his IRA minions.”

“They’re not buying into this new Anglo-Irish Agreement.”

She shook her head.  “A hundred thousand or so of them are going to march up to Belfast City Hall this very day and demand cash back on their purchase – with a dozen or so Members of Parliament leading the way, and God knows who else.”

Pete winced as the implications leaped into his mind.  “That many?  Are you sure?”

“Dead sure.”  The irony hung in the air.

“Are the MPs and march leaders planning on wearing targets on their coats?”

“They might as well.”

He leaned over the map beside her.  “Any intelligence on what the IRA has in mind for an answer?”

“Damned little, and I’m having trouble believing what I’ve got.”  She glanced up as Grant materialized beside her and handed her a new report.  “By God, if ever I needed Máire and her contacts . . . ”  Kathleen broke off and looked sharply at Pete.  “Just what was that phone call of yours, then?”

“MacGyver.  He found time for a quick call-in.”

She focused on him fully for the first time since he’d returned, her eyes searching his face.  “You’re never telling me your man’s actually _found_ her!”

“He isn’t certain.  He’s got a lead and he’s checking it out.”

Grant was also staring at Pete.  “How the **_hell_** did he pull that off?  It generally takes a crowbar to get the time of day out of a Taig!”

Kathleen whirled on him.  “By _God_ , Grant, I’ve told you before I’ll have you seconded to the RUC for a month’s worth of foot patrols if you can’t scratch that word out of your vocabulary!”

The man spluttered.  “But it’s – ”

“Did you think I was joking?”  At a peremptory gesture of hers, he retreated, stiff-backed, silent and uncontrite.  She turned back to Pete at the ops room emptied, her staff scattering to carry out their assignments out of range of the tornado’s center.  Pete caught more than one satisfied smirk at Grant’s rout.  “I’ll have a squad put together in ten minutes.  Where are we meeting him?”

“We aren’t.”

Kathleen’s eyes narrowed.  “You’re surely not thinking you’ll go out there alone?”

Pete sighed explosively, letting the frustration and bottled-up tension show for once.  “No, _I’m_ not, either!  I don’t even know just where he is or where he’s headed.”  He leaned his hands on the table and stared at the map.  “He wouldn’t have told me, and I didn’t ask.  In situations like this, he generally works alone.”

She spoke more softly.  “You don’t like that one whit, do you now?”

Pete shrugged.  “He gets results.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

He gave Kathleen a long look.  “Máire does the same thing to you, doesn’t she?”

“Fair drives me up the wall in screaming fits, you mean?”

“Well, yeah, more or less.”

Kathleen sighed, and the mask crumbled at the edges.  “Peter, I worked my arse off to get _out_ of this hell-hole of a province.  I was well and truly planted at my dream posting in Geneva, spending my days keeping _good_ people _alive_ while they actually tried to keep more souls from dying young – and Máire’s husband went and got himself shot.”

Pete laid a hand on her shoulder.  He expected her to stiffen and shrug it off, but she was looking blindly at the map, not seeing it or anything else for a few quiet moments.  He took a chance and slid his arm around her.  “There’s something I’ve been wondering – you said you’ve been friends for a long time.  But Máire’s Catholic, isn’t she?  And you’re, well – ”

“Not Catholic?  Sometimes I had to remind her of that myself – they had asked me to be the godmother to their child, can you believe it?”

Pete’s voice was gentle and encouraging.  He suspected she didn’t have many opportunities to speak her real thoughts.  “If she’s the same age as you, wasn’t that pretty late to start a family?”

“She always said the Pope be damned, but she would never bring a child into such a hate-filled world – and then suddenly she was pregnant at last, and they were so happy in spite of it all.  When she lost Padraig and the baby both, she nearly went mad.”

As Kathleen continued to speak, her shoulders had gradually begun to relax under Pete’s arm, and she leaned slightly towards him, apparently unaware of the source of the support.

“God knows the work she’s been doing is dangerous, but it’s what keeps her going.  Whilst I try to keep it from killing her . . . or killing me from the worry.  I pulled strings to get reassigned here so I could run her, and try not to let her run into a hail of bullets.”

Pete tightened his grip very slightly, and thought about the invitation that had brought him, an expendable stranger, halfway around the world on a flimsy pretext, so he could be propped up as a shield to keep a friend alive.  He should still be angry at the charade, but somehow, it didn’t seem particularly important at the moment.

The advancing years hadn’t dulled Pete’s hearing or his reflexes; he heard the footsteps approaching in the hallway while Kathleen still seemed unaware that anyone was nearby.  With a mental curse, he dropped his arm from her shoulders just before Grant entered the ops center – mouth-first, as always.  Pete briefly imagined shooting the man on the spot and passing it off as a bungled IRA assassination.

“Major, still nothing new on IRA movements.  Or lack thereof.”

“Are you telling me that with a hundred thousand potential targets packing the streets from corner to curbstone, IRA Brigade Command are going to be sitting on their arses watching the show?  Is that the best Stewart can do?”

Grant shrugged.

“Well, go roust Campbell out and see if he’s got his men to Belfast City Hall yet. We need them in place well before the marchers arrive.”  She turned back to Pete as Grant hurried out.

“No news is good news?”

“I wish I could believe it, but it’s like trusting in the Good Folk.  I just can’t.  Stewart’s got a good ear to the ground, but nothing like Máire . . . ”

They stood together, not quite touching, staring at the map of Belfast and silently wondering where Máire Ui Súilleabháin and MacGyver were.

 

 

 _If Noreen hadn’t had a pub to run and her family to look after, it might’ve been a lot harder to convince her that she couldn’t come with me._

 _And if she’d come, it might’ve been a lot easier to find Séan O’Boyle’s home.  I thought I’d spent enough time with the maps, not to mention just tooling around Belfast on the motorbike, to know how to get from one place to another; but there were streets torn up and changed in funny places.  It wasn’t just those ‘peace walls’:  thoroughfares had been turned into cul-de-sacs, as if parts of Belfast were being rearranged to make it harder for folks to get together . . . and maybe that’s just what was intended.  And, of course, you always run into the worst obstacles and roadblocks when you’re in a hurry._

 _When I finally **did** find the place, it gave me a real bad moment – I landed at the front door instead of the back, which wasn’t what I’d planned at all, and I thought I’d blown it.  But after a few minutes of watching, I realized there weren’t any signs of traffic around the front at all.  There were lights in back, and a good deal of noise, and plenty of traces of activity . . . but it was like the front and back doors had switched places._

 _Nobody at all passed in the street while I was picking the lock, and the front hallway was dark and silent.  There was a kitchen towards the back, and I could hear quite a party going on in there – at least four or five men, I figured, although they were making enough noise for a dozen.  Best as I could see from the hallway, they were sitting around a table, playing cards and drinking and horsing around.  I could hear the loud voices and the jokes, and there was nothing funny about what they said, although they were laughing enough themselves._

The stairway leading up to the second floor was narrow, steep, and dark.  Cat-soft in tennis shoes, Mac stole up the stairs and carefully peered around the edge of the doorway at the top.  Luck was with him – the kind of luck he preferred, which rose more from calculation than chance.  MacGyver didn’t like simple luck; its unreliability always made him nervous.

There _was_ a guard in the hallway, sitting by a closed door some twenty feet away; but he wasn’t watching the stairwell.  He wasn’t watching anything in particular – he had tilted the plain wooden chair back against the wall and was leaning back, eyes half closed, humming a tune that sounded vaguely familiar from the bellicose session at the pub the night before.  If the tune had actually been on key, Mac thought he might have managed to recognize it.

He did recognize the guard: Patrick Shanahan, identified in Walsh’s files as one of Connor’s followers. And it didn’t take any local knowledge to recognize the large brown glass bottle on the floor by Shanahan’s chair – not when he’d heard the tones of the raucous conversation in the kitchen downstairs as he’d slipped past.  That was the first piece of calculated luck.

His next piece of luck he was going to have to manufacture himself; the guard was inattentive and at least half drunk, but there was still a tidy stretch of hallway between the stairway and the chair, too long to cross before an alarm could be raised.  _Gotta get him closer – but not coming right at me . . ._ memory nudged him, and Mac checked his pockets – and pulled out the forgotten slingshot he’d confiscated from Bobby Gallagher that morning.

A quick check of the remaining pockets didn’t turn up much in the way of ammunition, but he did have a small box of matches that he’d pocketed at the pub – it was always good to have matches handy – and a collection of miscellaneous nuts and washers from repairing Noreen’s taps.

The biggest problem was going to be the twang of the slingshot; he wanted to divert Shanahan, not lure him into a head-on confrontation.  He’d have one shot at creating a distraction bigger than the slingshot itself, but not so large as to rouse the men downstairs.  Mac studied the hallway:  the bottle was a tempting target, but it looked too sturdy to shatter easily, and he thought there was still too much liquid in it for its balance to be unstable.  He made his decision and readied his shot.

The twang wasn’t as loud as he’d feared, just enough to make Shanahan sit up in puzzlement and glance down the hallway as the rattling began.  It had been tricky, getting the angle right to send the loaded matchbox into the only open doorway in the hall, where the dimly reflected gleam on tile meant a bathroom full of nice hard surfaces that made plenty of noise and echoes when the matchbox ricocheted, burst open, and scattered bolts and washers all over.  As a bonus, there was an extra thump and crash:  MacGyver must have knocked over something else, something larger and probably fragile.  Shanahan staggered to his feet, picked up the bottle and took an extra swig, then set it down and lumbered into the bathroom to investigate the racket.

MacGyver pocketed the slingshot, slipped out from his hiding place in the stairwell and took the extra few steps he needed to grab the bottle before he closed on the befuddled guard from behind.  The bottle made a satisfying thump when it connected; the liquid inside sloshed violently, but the cap held and the glass didn’t break, and Shanahan gave an even more satisfying grunt and crumpled to the floor in a limp heap.

Mac shoved him farther inside the bathroom until Shanahan’s legs were clear of the door, reached around to the inside knob and set the lock, and closed the door softly and firmly before hurrying down the hall to the now unguarded far door.

The room was no larger than the cramped back bedroom at Noreen’s, but it was nearly empty:  there was nothing in it except a bare mattress on a bedframe and a cheap deal dresser.  Máire Ui Súilleabháin lay sprawled on the bed, her nude body bruised and streaked with blood, and Mac’s throat clenched.  _Too late._   He wondered how Kathleen Walsh would take the news.

Then he realized that Máire wasn’t lying limply:  she was tied spread-eagle to the bedframe.  Above a duct tape gag, her eyes were blazing furiously at him as if she could hold a hostile world at bay just by glaring at it.

“Um, don’t – ” MacGyver started to say _Don’t be afraid_ and thought, _Who am I kidding?  She doesn’t look scared, she looks mad enough to chew old nails and spit out the rusty bits._   “Don’t worry – I’m a friend.  I’m here to get you out.”

He could feel heat starting to rise at the back of his neck, but her glare had softened when he started to speak.  “Um, you look kinda cold.”  There was no blanket on the bed, or even a sheet to be seen anywhere in the room; he shrugged out of his jacket and covered as much of her as he could with it.

“First things first – ”  He knew from experience how quickly shoulder and leg muscles could stiffen and cramp in that position, stretched out into unnatural immobility; but the gag would be the worst.  “Let’s get that tape off of you.”

Mac stepped back to the door and glanced down the hall quickly as he retrieved Patrick Shanahan’s brown glass bottle.  There was no sign of any disturbance and he could still dimly hear the noisy party below.  He closed and locked the door behind him and opened the bottle – as he’d guessed, it contained some kind of potent raw liquor, and the fumes that oozed out were nearly visible.

When he’d first entered the room, some indefatigable part of his mind had automatically observed and indexed its contents.  The mental list was very short in this case, but when he glanced around he already knew there was a pile of rags in one corner, although there was almost nothing else.

That half-unconscious catalogue didn’t prepare him for when he bent and picked up the rags and realized he was holding a woman’s clothes, or rather, the shredded ruins of them, ragged from innumerable knife slashes.  Mac’s stomach twisted, and his too-nimble mind ran ahead of where he wanted it to go, matching the rents in the garments he held to the pattern of bleeding cuts and gashes on Máire’s skin.  The lacerations were shallow and the blood was already drying, but the brutality hung in the air like a rancid aftertaste.

Mac shook off the images and tore a piece of cloth from the tattered remains of the blouse.  He could feel Máire’s puzzled gaze on him as he saturated the fabric:  but whatever the home-brewed rotgut was, it had a nice high alcohol content.  Once he’d thoroughly soaked down the duct tape, it peeled away from her face easily and painlessly.  She coughed and breathed deeply.  When she spoke, her voice was hoarse and strained.

“You must be one of Kathleen’s Yanks.”

“Uh, yeah.”  His American accent – that must be why she had stopped looking so ferocious as soon as he’d started to speak.  “The name’s MacGyver.”

“Well, ‘tis glad I am to be meetin’ you, MacGyver.  And if there’s any potcheen left in that bottle, I’d thank you to give us a drink.”

“Um, are you sure?  It smells like pretty foul stuff.”

“And ‘tis a pretty foul day I’ve been havin’.”  The uncompromising glint in her eye suddenly reminded Mac of his grandfather.  “Don’t you be pratin’ temperance at me now.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

He helped her drink, careful not to let her choke, feeling awkward.  She coughed again, violently, but when she spoke again her voice was much stronger.  “Jaysus, but our Seanachie always did make the worst fuckin’ potcheen in all the Falls.”

MacGyver’s Swiss Army knife made short work of the ropes on Máire’s ankles, and she sighed with relief and pulled her legs up as the taut strain was taken off.  But he checked when he reached the head of the bed; her wrists were locked separately to the bedframe with two sets of handcuffs of a type he’d never seen before.

“Huh.”  He frowned as he worked over the first lock.  “I’m not familiar with this kinda handcuffs.”

“They’re dead men’s bracelets.”

“What?”

“Sorry.  Dead peelers’ cuffs – I mean, they’re from RUC men that Connor or his mates have killed.  They take the handcuffs for trophies.”

 _Royal Ulster Constabulary – right.  Dead cops.  No wonder I haven’t seen this type before.  A little practice woulda helped . . .  if I’d known I coulda asked Walsh for a set._   Mac bit his tongue in concentration; something about the locking mechanism was resisting his usual bag of tricks.

Máire was studying his upside-down face.  “Will ye be needin’ the key?”

MacGyver tried not to glare or snap at her.  “You got it somewhere handy?”

“It’ll be walkin’ in that door inside of ten minutes.  Can ye be ready?”

“What do you mean?”  Mac’s frustrated scowl softened to a puzzled frown.

“Connor’s got the key.”

“And he’ll just hand it over?”

“They were all in the scullery gettin’ jarred and playin’ at cards when ye came up, weren’t they now?”

“Yeah . . . ”

“They’re playin’ to see who goes first.”

“You mean . . . ”  MacGyver gestured at the room and the bed vaguely, and felt the heat on his neck again.

“I do that.  They’ve done nothin’ worse than rough me up a bit . . . so far.”  Máire tried to shrug; she seemed a good deal calmer about it than Mac felt.  “Then they started to quarrel over it and, well, Paddy Shanahan lost the first hand and that’s why he was at the door.  The winner of the next hand . . . will be gettin’ it started.”

“So why are you so sure it’ll be Connor?”

“He’ll cheat.”

There didn’t seem to be much to say to that.  MacGyver straightened up and put his knife away.  “O-kay.”  He looked around the room and checked the dresser drawers – empty except for some oddments of old clothes – then stepped to the one thing he hadn’t examined yet, a closet door tucked into one corner.  The closet was empty also.  “Not much here.  Didn’t O’Boyle use this room for anything?”

“He lived alone, our Seanachie did, but he’d’ve used this for a box room.”

Mac was studying the patterns of dust on the closet floor.  “You mean for storage?  _Something_ was kept in here – and it was moved recently.”  Careful of splinters, he walked exploratory fingers along one side of the closet, where a long hole gaped in the rough board framing.

“Connor and his boys must’ve cleared out everything that wasn’t nailed down, the bastards.  Connor plays by his own rules and Liam doesn’t give a fuck who Connor pisses off.”

Something in her tone made Mac glance at her.  “Which one’s in charge?”

“Connor thinks he is.”

”And Liam likes it that way?”

“You catch on quick, Yank.  That he does.”

“Huh.”  MacGyver squatted down to peer under the bed, but found his view blocked.  It almost looked as if the bed was resting on a wooden platform, but when he reached underneath, felt for a handhold and tugged, he was able to slide aside a long board – the board that must have been torn from the closet wall – to reveal a dark cache behind. ~~  
~~

“You’re surely not after findin’ anything, are you?”

“I sure am.”  In the shadows, he couldn’t quite make out the lines of the irregularly shaped objects stashed under the bed, but he reached under and pulled out first a fiddle case and then a large round wood-framed hand drum.

“Sweet Mother Mary.”  Máire’s face had lit up with a surprising joy.  “That’s Noreen’s bodhran!”

“Her what?”

“Her drum.  Séan’s often lettin’ the musicians store their instruments here – I thought the bastards must have taken the lot!  Is that all?”

“No – ”  MacGyver could make out the familiar curve of a guitar case, and several other smaller shapes.

“Matty Gallagher must have hidden them.  There’s hope for the boy yet, so there is.”

They both felt rather than heard the tramp of heavy feet mounting the stairs.  Mac shoved the fiddle case back under the bed, slid the long board out of sight again, and hurried to unlock the door to the hallway.  He was about to slip into the closet when he heard Máire hiss, “MacGyver!”   He shot her a look, wondering if she’d lost her nerve at the sound of Connor’s approach.

“Your jacket!  Take your jacket!”

 _Guess not._   She had stretched her legs out again to look as if she was still tied down.  Mac snatched his jacket and ducked into the closet, still holding the bodhran, as the knob on the hall door turned.

With the closet door pulled nearly to, he could see a good deal of the room’s interior through the crack between the hinges, but it was hardly needed.  He could place Connor precisely by sound alone.  The door was shoved open, then slammed closed with a crash, and the heavy footsteps were nearly drowned out by a voice snarling, “Where the fuck are ye now, Paddy?  By God, if you’re in here already I’ll beat your fuckin’ brains into a bleeding jelly, so I will.”

Connor glared around the small room suspiciously.  MacGyver saw him narrow his eyes in the direction of the closet and take a step towards it, and braced himself; but Máire called out to Connor in a scathing tone.

“He’s in the loo, ye fuckin’ eejit.”  Connor whirled and advanced on her, and she barked at him and laughed mockingly.

As Mac took a firmer grip on the drum and slipped out of the closet, he could see the back of the big man’s neck flush red with rage.  ‘Barking’ Connor had forgotten everything but the woman in front of him, naked and defiant.  “I thought we’d shut your flappin’ gob for you already, ye fuckin’ informer bitch – ”  Mac felt his own face getting hot with anger at the sound of the blow that followed, but the diversion covered his footsteps as he closed on Connor.

The drum he’d found under the bed had surprised him with its weight and heft when he’d first picked it up; it was a good eighteen inches across and had a sturdy frame braced with cross-pieces, all solid hardwood – oak, he thought.  The cross-pieces provided a nice firm grip, and when Mac swung it backhand where Connor’s head met the thick neck, the big man shuddered and grunted, staggered, and turned partway around, exposing his jaw in clean profile.  MacGyver reversed his swing and brought the drum around again in an uppercut.  Connor went down, hard, and Mac felt the wood frame of the drum splinter and crack in his hand, transmitting the shock to his fingers in a stinging wave.

“Ow, _dang_ it.”  Mac shifted the bodhran to his left hand, flexing the sore fingers of his right as he studied the damage.  The hardwood frame had split under the blows, and one of the cross-pieces had come loose.  _Oh, great.  I can’t even pronounce it and now I’m gonna have to tell Noreen I broke it._

The key to the handcuffs was in Connor’s pocket, as Máire had said.  Mac freed her wrists and pocketed one set of cuffs for later study, then went back to where Connor lay sprawled on the floor and started to tug the man’s shirt off.  “You’ll need some clothes if we’re gonna get out of here – ”  He paused at the expression on her face.  “What’s up?”

Máire was rubbing her scraped wrists and staring at him as if he’d grown an extra head.  “Ye didn’t shoot him.”

MacGyver shrugged.  “Nope.”

“But whyever not?”

“Well, for starters, I don’t have a gun.”  There was a gun tucked into Connor’s waistband; Mac picked it up, pulled the clip, cleared the round from the chamber, and dropped the empty gun onto the floor.  “I don’t like guns.”

“I thought . . . I thought all Yanks fancied guns.”

“Yeah?  Well, I thought all Irish folks had red hair and kept pet leprechauns.”

“Are you away in the head, then?”  Her voice was becoming shrill, but Mac recognized the elemental tension behind it.  “Are you tellin’ me you came walkin’ into this house armed with nothin’ more than your _wits_?”

He grinned and handed her Connor’s shirt.  “Well, thanks to O’Boyle’s Best Bottled Bravado, it looks like everyone else here is half-armed.”

Máire’s eyes sparked at him.  “Catch yourself on, Yank!  Don’t ye be makin’ any assumptions.  Liam could drink the cellar dry and still put a bullet through your eye at a hundred paces.”

“Who’s making assumptions?  Didn’t _you_ assume I was packin’ a gun and all ready to shoot anything that moves?”

She shrugged into the shirt, rolling up the long sleeves.  Most of the Irish women MacGyver had seen so far were shorter than Americans; Connor’s shirt hung on her like a sack, and the shirt-tails reached nearly to her knees.  “Wherever _is_ Paddy then?  How did ye ever get past him so?”

“Like you said, he’s in the bathroom . . . I knocked him out and left him locked in.  You thought I’d killed him, didn’t you?”

Máire nodded, absently dabbing with a sleeve at her lip where Connor’s last blow had left her bleeding.  Mac studied her, trying to read the expression on her face, pensive and troubled and faintly bewildered.  “We need to get you out of here.  How many more are there downstairs?”

“It’s just Connor’s own unit – he and Roddy fell out last week, and Devil Mike’s stickin’ by Roddy; so there’s Kevin and Liam still down there, and Prater Tommy, and – and I suppose young Matty’s here as well?”

“Matt Gallagher?  Yeah, he’s here.”  Mac’s stomach knotted at the memory of their argument that morning.  “Is he . . . um, would he . . . that is, will he be in on the card game?”

“You mean, would a fifteen-year-old boy from a nice Catholic family be party to gang-rapin’ a woman old enough to be his own mother?”  Máire looked Mac squarely in the eye as she spoke, then glanced away before he could answer.  “Normally, I’d say yes, but Matty . . . maybe not.  Not yet.  I was hopin’ . . . ”

“What?”

“Well, I thought that with two down for starters, ye might have been up til takin’ out the lot.”

Mac’s expression turned hard.  “Look, I know they’ve got plenty to answer for after how they treated you, but I’m not here to carry out _anyone’s_ revenge for them.”

Máire looked at him in confusion and shook her head vigorously.  “Do you think I’m after wantin’ blood, then?  ’Tisn’t that at all!”  She pointed towards a tiny window in the back wall.  “If we could just keep them from leavin’ this house the day . . . can you not hear that sound?”

The window was too begrimed to let in any light, but a dull murmur outside had been growing for some time, too slowly to be consciously noticed.  “Half of Belfast is takin’ til the streets,” she continued.  “The Unionists are marchin’.  Thousands of them.  I heard Liam and Connor talkin’ about the protests – I was tryin’ to hear more when they caught me last night.”

“Hang on,” MacGyver said.  “Unionists – that’s the _other_ side, right?  The pro-British folks?”  He glanced towards the window.  “What’s Liam got up his sleeve – it _is_ Liam doing the real planning, right?”  Máire nodded.  “So taking Connor out of commission won’t even slow them down.”

“No more it won’t.  The Loyalists – the Unionists, Yank, ‘tis the same thing – they aren’t _plannin’_ to riot, but they’re set to catch fire at any spark.”

“Lemme guess.  Connor and Liam have a whole fistful of fireworks ready.”

She nodded.  “They’ve staked out rooftops along the protest route, and they mean to shoot into the crowds.  Most of the biggest names in Unionist politics will be in the march, right out in front where they can be targeted.”

MacGyver was frowning absently at nothing in particular, his mind racing.  “Four of them left, if you count Matt . . . there’s gotta be some way . . . ”  His mind hummed, racing forward in leaps that reviewed everything in the room and then mentally checked for corners where some other potentially useful item might have been overlooked.

“You could skip Matty and count Liam twice.  Either way, it’s four.”  Máire sat down on the bed and picked up Connor’s empty gun from where it lay on the floor.  “Even if we can sneak past them and get out of here, they’ll be long gone before Kathleen can get back here with the troops.”  She turned the gun over in her hands.  “My whole life I’ve hated these things.  And when I lost Padraig . . . ”  She looked desperately at MacGyver.  “ _Is_ there another way?”

Mac took the gun from her hands and set it on the dresser.  “I got an idea.”

 

-


	7. Invention

_**Seven: Invention** _

 

It never really felt different, this special way of thinking.  It wasn’t even thinking at all.  It was _perception_ ; objects acquired an abstract dimension, something that was always there but not always noticed.  Everything was a resource:  shapes, sizes, materials and properties, potential combinations . . . it had been like that since before MacGyver could remember.  The years on the bomb squad in Vietnam had sharpened the unconscious inclination to a razor edge that never grew dull, just as the fascination never faded.  Underneath every potential solution churned a barely-recognized excitement:  _what happens next?  Will it work?  If it doesn’t, what else is there to try?_

Stooping down, MacGyver pushed aside the board under the bed and extracted the guitar case, a smaller case that proved to hold a concertina, and a string bag holding an assortment of pennywhistles, a pitch pipe, and a small turned-wood stick that he recognized as the double-ended beater for the bodhran.  He also spotted the remains of the roll of duct tape the Provisionals had used on Máire, which had rolled under the dresser.  He tossed it to her.

“We need to get Connor out of sight.  Tie up his wrists and ankles and I’ll stash him in the closet.”

“But why?”

“’Cause he won’t fit under the bed.”

Mac didn’t need to watch Máire’s face; he could feel her bewildered gaze on him as he studied the concertina, then set it aside and examined the pennywhistles.  Two were store-bought, lightweight aluminum, but two others looked home-made:  they were of different lengths, stouter and heavier, apparently made from pieces of steel pipe, probably for the sake of lower pitch and deeper tone.

He’d had plenty of confused onlookers before.  He could almost feel Máire shift from confusion to alarm when he opened the guitar case and took out his knife.

“What the fuck are you after doin’, Yank?”

“Finding another way.”  Now that his idea was taking shape, he could spare the attention to talk to her.  “You seem to know these guys pretty well.  What’re they gonna do when Connor doesn’t come back downstairs?”

Máire had been struggling to roll Connor over; she stopped and considered before she answered.  “That will depend on whether Liam wins the next hand.”  Mac saw her shudder.  “But I don’t think he will – the game was his idea, but he won’t be playin’ to win.”

“He wanted to humiliate you.”

“He did that.  He was furious that he’d never suspected me before.”  She set to work on Connor’s ankles.  “‘Twill be Kevin or Prater Tommy, likely, who wins next.  And neither of them will wait for Connor to return; they’ll come up directly.”

“Together, or one by one?”

“Ah, I see what you’re after!  But I don’t know.  They might both come up together.”

“Well, we’ll just have to hope they play nice and take turns.”  Mac closed the guitar case, not without a look of regret at the beautiful instrument inside, and slid it back under the bed, along with the ruined bodhran.  He stopped to drag Connor to the closet, picked up his jacket and shrugged it on again, and returned to his work.

“Walsh seems to think your legal system’s a real mess.  If she’s able to collect these guys before they can scatter, can you make charges stick to them?”

 “Connor’s burned a lot of bridges . . . if I testify, others should too.”  Máire picked up the roll of duct tape and turned it over in her hands.  “And by Christ, Kathleen can’t stop me this time!  I’m well and truly blown.  God knows where I’ll go after all this, but I can sing out loud and clear first.  Kathleen will have what she’s been wantin’ this past year and more:  a fistful of watertight convictions, and me off the streets and out of the heart of the danger zone.”

“I know the feeling,”  Mac murmured.  “You two go way back, don’t you?”

“We met at university . . . the Proddy and the Taig girl.  By God, didn’t she love tweakin’ people’s noses with our friendship!  She should never have come back here.  She fuckin’ hates Belfast.”  Máire looked around the room restlessly.  “Fuck me if I’ve the least notion what you’re after, Yank, but is there anything I can be doin’ to help?”

“Yeah.”  MacGyver dug into a pocket, fished out the magazine from Connor’s gun and tossed it to her.  “Pull the bullets out of that.  And how ‘bout you call me ‘Mac’ instead of ‘Yank’?”

“Fair enough, Mac.  Are ye gettin’ tired of the word now?”

“Gettin’ tired of a coupla words.”  Mac walked over to the light switch and set to work with his screwdriver blade.  “But it could be worse – I’ve been in places where ‘Yankee’ meant ‘Satan’.  Here . . . ”

Máire chuckled, and Mac started; he hadn’t heard the sound of honest laughter in what felt like days.  “Here, it means somethin’ between devil and angel, with a bit of both.”

“Yeah.  I guess it does.”

“We’re all large, rowdy families here.  And you’re the cousins who made it good – we brag about you behind your backs and treat you like shite when you come for a visit.”

“And I’m not even Irish.”  Mac went back to the dresser, picked up the concertina and studied it again.  “Just as well, I guess.”

“Oh, yes.  We treat our own much worse.”  Máire handed Mac the bullets and the empty clip, and he dropped them into his pockets.  He saw her wince when he opened his knife again and set to work on the concertina, carefully slitting it open at one end just above where the bellows met the handgrip.

“If Liam doesn’t kill you, Séan O’Boyle might just.”  She watched him work with a fascination that reminded MacGyver uncomfortably of horrified onlookers at a particularly gruesome accident.  “And if _he_ doesn’t, half of Belfast will want you dead for what you’re doin’ with that concertina.”

“If we get out of this, I’m pretty sure it can be fixed . . . ”

“I’m pretty sure you’re right, and the other half of Belfast will want you dead for _that_.  Couldn’t you finish the damned thing off while you’re at it?”

Mac spared a rueful thought for the number of times Pete had ‘cleaned up’ after him, paying for damage, destruction or appropriation of innocently bystanding objects.  _I bet James Bond never has to apologize for wrecking someone’s car._   “Don’t worry, we’ll make sure everything’s either fixed or replaced . . . ”

“If we live to see tomorrow’s sun rise.”

“Well, yeah.”  MacGyver picked up Connor’s gun.  He was surprised that the man hadn’t been packing some oversized cannon, but it was a Walther PPK, compact and sleek and brutally ugly, with a well-tended look that made Mac’s skin crawl.  _It’s a shame to let good machinery go . . ._ if he could, he’d leave every gun in Ulster out in the rain to rust solid and fall apart into oxidized flakes.  Engines of death.  But this one was a solid object of the right size and weight.  “Hand me that duct tape, will ya?”

Máire complied. “And are ye sure these contraptions of yours will work?”

Mac shrugged.  _If I had a nickel for every time someone’s asked me that . . ._   “Well, that depends on what you mean by ‘work’.  I’m sure the laws of physics aren’t suddenly gonna get selective about how they behave.  Beyond that . . . it depends on how many boozed-up knuckleheads we have to deal with at once.”

“Don’t ye be countin’ on that too much.”  A haunted shadow passed over her face.  “You wouldn’t credit how fast hatred can sober a man up.”

MacGyver glanced from Máire’s bruised and battered face to the hallway door.  “It can’t be much longer.  Do you want to get into the closet, so you’re out of sight when they come in?”

She gave the closet door, with its frail offer of sanctuary, a long look before she shook her head.  “No, by Christ.  I may have to leave the country after all this carry-on, but I’ll be fucked if they’ll make me cower in the corner till then.”

Mac was finding it easier to tune out the foul language.  He simply nodded; her answer hadn’t really surprised him.  “In that case, how would you like to take a crack at them?”

 

When the heavy footsteps thumped towards them down the hallway, MacGyver could tell easily that there was more than one person coming.  He glanced at Máire.  “Two, I think.  Guess they got impatient.  Remember – we want them to come all the way into the room, and we don’t want them to get out and go back down the stairs to bring reinforcements.”

She nodded, looking somewhat pale but determined, and flattened her back against the wall on the far side of the light switch by the door.

Heavy thumping on the door was accompanied by a loud bellow.  “Connor?  You’re fuckin’ takin’ long enough fuckin’, Connor!”

“By God,” Máire murmured.  “That was the verb instead of the adjective.  Mark that; it’s rare enough.”

“Shhh!”

The door was shoved open and the two men burst into the room.  Mac saw that Máire had been right – along with Kevin Kelly, he recognized the other as ‘Prater’ Tommy McLaughlin, Paddy Shanahan’s nephew, the youngest member and most recent recruit to Connor’s unit – not counting Matt, who had only been identified in Walsh’s files as a ‘suspected affiliate’.  They must have been expecting to see Connor or Paddy, or both, but instead saw only MacGyver, leaning casually against the dresser, Paddy’s bottle dangling in one hand.  The two men stared in confusion from Mac to the empty bed beside him.

Mac grinned foolishly and waved the bottle at them in an aimless toast.  “Well, look who’s finally joined the party.  Lookin’ for somethin’, boys?”

“Jaysus, it’s that fuckin’ Yankee bartender from the pub last night,”  Kevin spluttered.

“Yeah, that’s right.  Ya wanna drink?”  With a sudden violent wave of his arm, Mac dashed the potcheen from the bottle into their faces, aiming for their eyes first while trying to splash as much of the liquid over them as possible.

He got Kevin squarely in the face and chest with the stinging liquid, and the big man yelped and scrabbled at his eyes, stumbling backwards.  His clumsy retreat brought him to within range of where Máire waited, clutching one of the large steel pennywhistles in each hand.  She stepped forward and jabbed them into his back, a short distance apart.

She could only take a short step out from the wall – MacGyver had used the metal guitar strings as wires, threading them through the open fingering holes in the steel whistles and down the hollow centers before patching them into the house current at the light switch.  Even twisting the strings together for reinforcement, he’d only had a short length to work with.  He’d used strips of padding cut from the guitar case lining to form insulated grips at the ends of the pennywhistles, well wrapped with duct tape, but Máire could still feel a tickle in her fingers as the current flowed through the circuit.

But that was nothing to what Kevin felt.  He let out a high-pitched scream of pure agony at the electrical shock; Mac spared a quick glance in their direction and saw from Máire’s face that it was pure music to her ears.  That one glimpse was all he had time for as McLaughlin bore down on him.  The wave of liquid had only splashed his face, and he was glaring red-faced at MacGyver and reaching into his waistband for a gun.

The bottle was nearly empty, and Mac tossed it aside in the general direction of the bed; Máire was still barefoot, and he didn’t want to risk scattering broken glass over the floor.  He stepped back to the dresser and picked up the concertina, gripping it firmly by one handle, steadying it with his other hand, long fingers fanned out as if he was getting ready to pitch a softball.

McLaughlin had his gun out and was bringing it to bear when he saw what MacGyver held.  The sheer incongruity checked him for a moment, a derisive smirk beginning to spread over his face.

“Are ye after playin’ us a tune, then?  Yer own funeral march like?”

“Yup,” Mac replied.  “Something like that.”  He swung his arm.

During the wait in the bare upstairs room, Mac had had only a few minutes to practice his aim with the odd contraption; but it had been enough.  As he swung the concertina one-handed, the bellows extended and whipped around, centrifugal force lending extra power to the impact when the other end of the concertina, with the added solid weight of Connor’s pistol taped firmly inside, cracked against McLaughlin’s gun hand.  The gun went flying.  From the sound of the impact and the pained shock on the man’s face, Mac guessed he’d broken the hand.

McLaughlin roared like an outraged bull and charged forward; Mac slipped nimbly aside, reversed the arc of the concertina’s swing and brought it around again to connect with the man’s skull.  McLaughlin collided with the dresser and slid to the floor in a boneless heap.  Mac turned to see how Máire was doing.

After the first electrical shock, Kevin had pulled himself away and drawn his own gun, a massive Glock semi-automatic.  Máire jabbed at the gun with the pennywhistles, catching it between them and sending a heavy jolt through the metal into his hand.  His fingers spasmed so hard that an eternal moment passed before he could drop the pistol and end the agony.  MacGyver looked in time to see him sink to the ground moaning and clutching his shaking hand.

Máire looked up at him with her face alight.  “By God, Mac, that’s it!  We’ve done it!”

“Watch out!”  Mac yelled as he saw Kevin shake his head, stagger back to his feet, and go for Máire again.

At the pub the previous night, no amount of liquor had seemed to affect anyone for the worse.  Now Kevin’s obvious intoxication seemed to have given him a thick-headed resilience that overrode pain.  Máire jabbed him with the pennywhistles again, full in the chest, where a dark patch marked where the potcheen had soaked his shirt.  Mac hoped that the dampness might provide an additional conductive medium; Kevin roared and twitched with the pain, shaking his head back and forth like a maddened dog, but stood his ground, swaying.

MacGyver suddenly smelled the sharp, pungent odor of stressed metal overheating.

“Máire!  Back off!  The wires won’t take it!”  He wasn’t sure she understood, and it was too late anyway – the steel and bronze guitar strings had given way under the load of the current and burned through.

Kevin rocked back on his heels as the electrical shock suddenly came to an end; Máire stared in horror at the pennywhistles that had lost their magic power of salvation and backed away.  In the commotion, Mac was only peripherally aware that the door to the hallway had been opened again.

Mac was still holding the concertina in his right hand; he reached into his pocket with his left hand, pulled out a handful of the bullets from Connor’s gun and scattered them on the floor at Kevin’s feet.  As the big man stepped forward, still unsteady, he stepped on them, lost his footing and went down hard.  Mac swung the concertina again and saw the man go limp at last.

MacGyver turned to the doorway and saw Matt Gallagher standing in the hallway, his face white and strained, staring at Kevin and Tommy’s still forms.  “Oh fuckin’ Christ.  Oh fuckin’ Christ.”

Mac took a step towards the boy.  “Matt, they’re not dead.  Nobody has to die.  Do you understand?”

Matt stared at him with wild eyes, then turned and bolted.  Mac started after him.

“Mac, _no_!”  Máire called.  MacGyver halted and looked at her.  “’Tis Liam himself is still down there!”

Mac shook his head to clear it of the haze of adrenaline, fighting the impulse to rush headlong after Matt.  “Oh, great.  And now he’s been warned . . . ”  He hefted the concertina in his hand and closed it up again, studying the marks of strain on the bellows.  It had worked against two gunmen, but it suddenly seemed like a foolish child’s toy, an overly clever gimmick.

Downstairs, they could hear the pounding of running footsteps and shouts, Matt’s high-pitched voice and a deeper response.  More footsteps, but not up the stairs towards them; instead, the back door slammed, a car engine roared outside and sudden silence gripped the house with a palpable sense of emptiness.

Máire breathed deeply again, for what seemed like the first time in hours.  “They . . . they’ve legged it.”  She looked at MacGyver.  “They’ve gone.”

“Guess so.”  Mac put down the concertina, located the duct tape and started to secure the two unconscious men, beginning with Kevin.  “The question is, _why_?  Why didn’t Liam come up here and finish the job?  He just ran out on his own men!”

Máire’s voice was soft, but her tone was flat.  “Liam’s got bigger fish to fry, and no-one left to be doin’ his dirty work for him.  Connor and the others were always expendable.”

Mac looked up from his work to stare at her in growing horror.  “Then they’re not just running off . . . he’s headed for the rooftops.  They’re gonna fire into the crowds of marchers, like you said.”

Máire nodded miserably.  “Belfast will go up in flames – if Liam can start a bloodbath ‘twill be all his heart could wish.”

“But _why_?  What good can anyone get from it?  I thought this Agreement business was supposed to be a step towards peace.”  Mac moved on to McLaughlin.  “Won’t a riot just end up killing more folks on their own side?”

“Liam and his kind don’t _want_ peace!  They want to see every Protestant in Northern Ireland dead!”  She threw up her hands.  “Nothin’ less will satisfy them.  And they don’t fuckin’ care how many Catholics die along the way.”

Mac finished with McLaughlin and rolled him onto his side to make sure the unconscious man’s breathing was unimpeded.  The sight of his face gave Mac an unexpected wrench.  Red-faced with anger and brandishing a semiautomatic pistol, Prater Tommy had seemed much older than his 25 years; now, with the radical fire temporarily dimmed, he looked not only terribly young but hauntingly familiar.  He reminded MacGyver of one of his friends from Western Tech, a much-admired upperclassman who had taught Mac several unsanctioned shortcuts in his lab work.  Michael Reilly had graduated and joined the Army Corps of Engineers, and the jungles of Laos had swallowed him forever.  In Mac’s memory, he was still twenty-five years old.

Mac gritted his teeth.  _Enough._   “We’ve gotta get word out to Major Walsh.  How many other IRA units are involved?”

“None at all.”

“ _What_?”

“None, I tell you!  Connor was under orders from the Provisional Brigade leader _not_ to attack the marchers – _they_ don’t want a riot and they’ve other plans.”  Máire wrapped her arms around herself as if to keep out a freezing wind.  “But Liam won’t let it go.  He and Connor were all set to break off on their own.  Nothin’ will stop him.”

Mac’s face went hard.  “He’s just one man.”

“Two, with Matty.”

“Maybe.”

“ _MacGyver!_   Ye’re wired up but ye’re not fuckin’ plugged in!  Ye can’t be thinkin’ of goin’ after Liam **_now_**! He’ll kill ye!”

“Maybe.”  Mac looked her full in the eyes.  “Do you know where Liam’s stakeout’s gonna be?”

 

 _I had to leave Máire at the house, to call Major Walsh and bring in the troops, and get Connor and his boys under lock and key.  At least that put Máire out of the combat zone and back under Walsh’s wing.  I thought about waiting – Pete must still be with Walsh, and a little backup would have been nice to have – but there wasn’t any time to spare._

 _The streets of Belfast had been mean to begin with, but they were gettin’ downright nasty._

-


	8. Ascension

_**Eight: Ascension** _

 

 _They call Belfast ‘the big smoke’, and it was sure earning its nickname – although ‘the big fog’ might’ve been closer.  The fog didn’t smell of the nearby sea; it was the kind of city fog that makes your nose wince, threaded with factory smoke and car exhaust and bad furnaces, with an undernote of burnt food and short tempers, pent-up rage and narrow views.  This late in November, the light would’ve been starting to fade anyway by mid-afternoon; under the reeking overcast, it never really seemed to be full daylight at all.  
_

 _Lousy light for shooting, and it was getting worse . . . but how good a shot does someone have to be to hit random targets in a packed mass of people solidly filling several city blocks?  The march was **huge** – there couldn’t have been less than a hundred thousand people spilling through Belfast like a ton of rough gravel being pushed through a narrow chute.  The only consolation I had, as I tried to find a way to dodge the mob and the police checkpoints, and catch up with Liam, was that he’d be dealing with the same obstacles.  Except that he knew the territory.  
_

 _But he and Matt were in a car – Máire had given me the description and the plate – while I had McMahon’s best motorbike, which could go through places where a car would have to go around.  If I managed to get back to Shannon, I’d have a few scratches and dings to explain away, but any extra charge he wanted to tack on to the rental would be more than worth it.  I’d even throw in a few drinks or a free tune-up and figure I still had the best of the deal._

 

Máire Ui Súilleabháin had not known exactly where Liam planned to stage his attack – the plans had been unsettled due to uncertainties about the march route and the progress of the rally – but she had given MacGyver a short list of possibilities and a succinct summary of Liam’s intentions.  She had also tried again to talk him out of following Liam, or at least into waiting for Walsh to arrive with support troops.  Her language had become even more unprintable after she realized she was wasting her breath, until she finally decided to save it.

Once Mac had a sense of how the rally was going and where the crowds were bunching up and eddying as the day waned, he skipped over two of Máire’s suggestions and struck pay dirt almost immediately, spotting Liam’s car tucked up a side street where it must have been abandoned when the driver could no longer make headway against the multitudes in the packed streets.

The target building was three blocks away, and Mac carefully approached it on foot by an alleyway that ran beside the building.  The light was dimming fast, but he spotted the long shape of a fire ladder leading up towards the roof.  At its foot, Matt Gallagher stood at guard.  Mac’s throat clenched when he saw the gun Matt was carrying:  it was a Russian-made Dragunov sniper’s rifle.

So soon after Prater Tommy, Matt’s terrible youth seemed like an appalling stairstep down the years:  Connor’s unit spanned a wide range of ages, as the interminable undeclared war stretched its bloody hands into yet another generation.  Mac set his teeth, took a very deep breath, tucked his hands into his pockets and stepped casually out into the open alleyway.

“Hey, Matt.”

“MacGyver!”  Matt swung around and faced Mac, pointing the rifle at him, but without conviction.  “For fuck’s sake, Mac, this isn’t your fight!  Why did ye have to be followin’ us?”

“Are you sure it’s _your_ fight, Matt?”  Mac began to walk towards Matt, slowly, trying to project a calm confidence that he didn’t feel at all.  Matt’s nervous, wavering aim didn’t help.  “Are you sure this is the best way of fighting it?”

“Stay back, MacGyver, or I swear I’ll shoot ye!”

“Why?”  Mac stopped about ten feet away from Matt.  “ _Why_ shoot?  Why kill me?  You just said it isn’t my fight.”  He gestured towards the rising sound of the approaching crowd.  “Why shoot any of _them_?  Do you honestly believe that’ll get you what you really want?  Matt . . . what good can it _possibly_ do?”

Matt didn’t answer.  His eyes flickered nervously from MacGyver’s face to the gun in his own hands to the deepening shadows that surrounded them.

Mac took another step forward and gestured towards the ladder.  “Matt, you gotta let me go up there and stop him.  Nobody has to die today.”

Matt took a half step back and bit his lip.  “Mac, get out of here while ye can, _please_ . . . ”  His eyes shifted again.

MacGyver realized what he meant a moment too late.  There was only a faint sound of a step behind him as Liam materialized out of the shadows like a fist swung by the malevolent spirit of the city itself.

He was carrying a Kalashnikov machine gun, aiming the butt at Mac’s head as if he meant to fell him like a tree.  Mac twisted around, trying to sidestep, but Liam was on him; he threw up his left arm barely in time to block the vicious swing.  The blow caught him solidly on the upper arm and he felt his left hand suddenly go numb as if someone had switched it off.

Mac grunted and fell back, ducking as Liam swung the gun around again, and the weight slammed down on his back and left shoulder with bruising force, just missing the head again but knocking him off-balance.  A kick from a steel-toed brogan connected with his leg, and Mac stifled his yell of pain as he went down – shouting for help in a back alley in Belfast seemed about as good an idea as thrashing around in shark-infested waters.

The next kick caught him in the side.  Mac tried to roll away from it and scramble to his feet, but Liam brought the butt of the Kalashnikov down onto his already bruised shoulder with a force that felt like a pile-driver, and followed it up with another kick that knocked the remaining breath out of him.

 _Liam’s hands were broken years back in Long Kesh,_ Máire had warned him. _They hurt him yet, especially when it’s damp.  He doesn’t like to use his fists – he’ll kick and club you instead if he can.  And he fights dirty.  
_

 _No kidding._

Above him, he could hear Liam berating Matt.  “Ye fuckin’ glipe, what were ye after chatterin’ with him for so long?”

“Liam, you told me to keep him busy so you could take him down.”

“I didn’t tell ye to chat him up, did I now?  Matty, you’ve got to be _careful_ who ye trust.  Don’t ye be givin’ an ear til the Devil and his lies – he’ll be tellin’ you ye’re bound for the heights even as he drags you under.”

MacGyver could see his hands splayed out in front of him and could feel the gritty cement under his right palm – no, under both palms:  the back of his left hand was numb, and he couldn’t quite move all his fingers, but the hand was still there.  He leaned on his right hand and arm and dragged himself to his knees, his ears singing with the effort.  Through the haze he heard Liam laugh.

“Sure, that’s it, Yank!  Up on your knees now – ‘tis a fine time to be sayin’ a prayer.”  Liam reached out, grabbed a fistful of Mac’s hair and hauled him painfully upwards, forcing MacGyver’s blurred gaze directly into his.  His eyes gleamed with malice.  “Let’s hear your catechism now.  Can ye be givin’ us a Hail Mary?”

“Liam – ”  Matt’s voice came hesitantly, only dimly heard through the haze of pain.

“Ah, that’s right, Matty; we musn’t be makin’ any assumptions now.”  Liam shook MacGyver’s head roughly by the hair, and Mac nearly lost his precarious balance.  “Church or chapel, Yank?”

“What . . . ?”  Mac tried to use the pain to clear his head so he could focus.

“Are ye _Catholic_ , man?”

“Like that matters . . . ” MacGyver croaked.

Liam shoved MacGyver down again so hard his hands slipped from under him and he sprawled on the rough pavement.  “Ye just **don’t get it** , do ye?  Fuckin’ **_Proddy_** _!_ ”  Mac didn’t actually see Liam’s next move, but he could sense the animal rage behind it, a searing wave of white-hot hatred and contempt.  He rolled in time for Liam’s steel-toed boot to miss his kidneys and took the kick in the ribs instead.  He couldn’t tell if the blaze of pain that followed signaled a cracked rib or just another livid bruise.

Out in the main thoroughfare, the noises of the approaching crowd were growing louder.  Liam half turned from MacGyver’s prostrate form and tossed his gun to Matt.  “Finish him off.”

Matt had set the sniper’s rifle aside; now he caught the Kalashnikov in a clumsy hold and gaped at Liam.  “What?”

“He’s a Prod and an informer.  **Kill him**.”  Matt clenched his fingers on the gunstock as Liam stepped up to him, towering over him, and squeezed his shoulder reassuringly.  “For fuck’s sake, you’ve got to be startin’ somewhere, boy!  ‘Tis time ye were growin’ up.”  He gestured towards the murmuring streets beyond the alleyway and grinned with a horrible delight.  “That’ll be the crowd passin’ by – we mustn’t miss that, Matty!”

The boy fumbled with the heavy gun and stared from Liam to MacGyver.

“Matty, this is no fuckin’ time to go gutless on me!”  Liam’s voice suddenly became harsh with contempt.  “If ye can’t be the man of the house now, count on it, he’ll have his filthy Proddy hands on your precious sister, if he hasn’t made a whore of her already.” _  
_

Matt flushed scarlet and looked away.  “Liam, enough of that . . . get on, I’ll take care of him . . .  I swear it . . .”

Liam picked up the Dragunov, slung it over his back, and sprang for the ladder.  He hauled himself up rapidly and faded from sight into the falling dusk.

MacGyver pulled himself up out of the whirlpool of fire and slowly staggered to his feet to find Matt training the Kalashnikov on him.  The boy’s face was as white as a sheet.

 _Up a long ladder . . ._

Mac tore his gaze from the monstrous glaring cyclops eye of the gun’s aperture to look Matt directly in the eyes.  He could see that the boy was starting to quiver.  Slowly, as if he were reaching out to pet an unfamiliar and jittery dog, Mac stretched out a careful hand and gently eased the muzzle away to the side.  There was an interminable black moment when the gun didn’t move and the aim held, and then Matt’s fragile determination crumbled and the barrel sagged down towards the ground.

Matt’s hands were shaking so hard he could barely hold the gun.  “’Tisn’t so easy, ’tis one gun in thousands . . . what fuckin’ difference will it make tomorrow?”

MacGyver kept his voice soft and earnest.  “You’re right, Matt – nobody can disarm the whole country.  But if _you_ have just one gun in your own hands, _you_ can always put it down.”  Mac stepped softly away from Matt, towards the ladder.  “I’m going up there.”

“Liam will kill ye.”  Matt’s face was beginning to stream with tears.

“Maybe.  But _you_ won’t.”

“Wait!  Stop it right there.”  Suddenly the boy’s grip was firm again on the gun stock, and Mac sucked in his breath.

But the muzzle didn’t swing back towards him.  Instead, Matt aimed it at a stack of ragged boxes ten feet down the alleyway and fired off a short burst.  Then he let the gun drop again.

“Liam would notice if there weren’t any shots . . . he notices shite like that.”  Matt looked up at MacGyver, his eyes now clear again, and held out the gun.  Mac stepped back and shook his head.  “Are ye sure ye won’t be needin’ this yourself?”

Mac grinned and set his foot on the bottom rung of the ladder.  “Naw, I’ll do better without it.”  He began to haul himself up one-handed; his left arm was still half numb, but he was beginning to feel his fingers again.

 

Moving fast, MacGyver was well up the ladder when the attack slammed into him.  The sudden and acute awareness of height washed through him, the adrenalin-fueled fire in his blood freezing as his skin crawled and his stomach clenched.  The increasing distance between himself and the lethal concrete landscape below yawned into an infinite chasm.  Mac’s palms began to sweat, and he had to tighten his grip on the rungs until his fingers ached.

 **_Not now!!_ **

But it was an old and familiar enemy.  He’d been fighting it for years, beating it back in endless skirmishes, although he never seemed to win the war.  Mac let the momentum of his own movements take over while he fought – he could not afford to let the old demons slow him down now.

 _Open the hand.  Lift.  Close.  Pull.  Steady with the other hand – can almost grip the rungs with it now.  Cold hard metal, solid and real.  Foot.  Other foot.  Look up. **Look up.  Up!!**   Repeat.  Open the hand.  Lift.  Close.  Pull.  **Focus**. _

_Up a long ladder and down a short rope . . ._

Gravity was clawing at his back and legs, as if the intractable rage and malice of the city itself wanted him to fall, to fail, one more body in the eternally lengthening list of casualties.  The thirsty streets of Belfast were ready for a fresh coat of blood, always ready again even before the last coat was dry.

Suddenly MacGyver was angry himself, hot with fury at the old fear that always chose the worst moments to attack.  With the anger, fresh adrenalin washed through him, burning away the ice and carrying him up the ladder.  The pain in his left shoulder retreated to an unimportant distance, although he still couldn’t get a firm grasp with that hand.

 _Up a long ladder and down a short rope . . ._

The jingling rhythm of the line had stuck in his head, and its momentum pushed him on, like the daily rhythms of life that carried the Irish through the chaos of their own belabored existence.  When Mac reached for the next rung and found none, the jarring break in the rhythm was disorienting, almost painful.  He was at the top.

MacGyver pulled himself up the last few feet to the edge of the rooftop and peered cautiously over.  He spotted Liam immediately, lying prone at the edge of the roof overlooking the street, perhaps thirty feet away:  a grotesque hunting predator waiting for the herds of oblivious prey to file into place below him.  Light from the street glinted on the barrel of the Dragunov and caught the irregular white patches of Liam’s hands, although the rest of him was in shadow.

 _Liam’s hands hurt him yet, especially when it’s damp._

Mac threaded his left arm through the rungs of the ladder to hold himself steady, pulled out Bobby’s slingshot again, and felt in his pockets for ammunition. _No good firing matchboxes at him . . . gotta have something with some sting to it._   The back of his left hand was still numb, and he couldn’t grip as tightly as usual, but the hand was steady enough as he took aim.

There had still been two bullets from Connor’s gun left in his pocket; Mac held one cupped in his right palm as he fired off the first, drawing the slingshot again and letting off the second shot in quick succession.  He hadn’t practiced that rapid-fire double-shot technique since childhood, and with no real time to aim, the second shot invariably went wide of its target.  But it was good enough.

The first shot caught Liam squarely on the back of his right hand – Mac saw the hand jerk away from the gun and heard the fulminating curse at the sudden flare of pain.  The second shot was only meant to win another precious second of distraction.  It clattered against the brick near Liam as Mac tossed the slingshot aside, vaulted the last few feet onto the roof, and launched himself at the terrorist.

The footing was rough and the light was terrible, and Liam had learned his fighting in a dirty school.  But it made him predictable.  MacGyver blocked a kick to the knee and a blow to the groin as they grappled over the rifle.  He was better prepared this time for the hate-fueled intensity of Liam’s wiry strength, but the sharp stinging blow to Liam’s hand had done more than just break his focus and ruin his aim:  it had enraged him.

Mac tried to twist the gun out of Liam’s grasp, but the older man held it across his body in a bulldog grip, trying to bulldoze Mac towards the edge of the roof.  When Mac tried to break his charge, Liam suddenly threw his weight against him and twisted the rifle in turn, catching it around Mac’s throat and bearing him to the ground.  MacGyver found himself lying on his stomach right on the edge of the roof, with Liam crouched over him trying to choke him with the rifle barrel.  The drop into the alleyway gaped below them.  The personal demons he’d only just beaten down on the ladder were grinning back up at him again.

MacGyver wrapped his hands on top of Liam’s where he was hauling back on the rifle, trying to crush it against Mac’s throat.  He drove his fingers into the backs of Liam’s hands, digging the fingertips as hard as he could into the delicate spiderweb of bones and nerves.  The Irishman screamed, a piercing howl of pure agony, and the pressure on Mac’s windpipe disappeared as the gun fell out of Liam’s nerveless grasp and clattered into the shadows of the alleyway under them.

Liam rolled away from where MacGyver lay and started to rise to his feet, reaching to the back of his waistband.  The gesture had already become nightmarishly familiar.  _Not **another** gun_ _!_

When the first shot rang out across the roof, Mac was momentarily disoriented; Liam hadn’t yet drawn whatever pistol he had in reserve.  The shot had come from behind them, and had passed well off to the side.  Liam flinched and looked around wildly.

“ _MacGyver_!”  Pete’s voice, a welcome sound from another, safer world, rang out from the direction of the ladder.

Another shot sang out, well above their heads, and Mac realized that Pete was only trying to rattle Liam and keep the pressure on him.  But Liam didn’t realize that.  He flinched down and sideways again, still scrabbling at his waistband for his own pistol.  Mac saw that he’d been thrown off-balance, and watched him take a step back to steady himself – but the step was too close to the roof edge where the footing was uneven and slick from the clammy damp and fog.

Time slowed horribly as Liam tried to pull himself back from the misstep, and his body twisted in the impossible struggle against gravity.  MacGyver dived towards the falling man, but he seemed to be moving very slowly himself.  The demons dragged Liam down even as Mac tried to reach him, and he was gone.

Once again Mac was lying prone on the edge of the drop, looking down into the shadows of the alleyway as he clutched at the edge; but now the demons had turned their attention elsewhere, uninterested in him for once.  As he drew back from the brink and dragged himself to his knees, he could hear Pete calling his name.

“MacGyver!  Are you all right?”

“Yeah . . . I’m okay . . . I think.”  Mac took a long breath and winced as the adrenalin started to fade and the bruises in his battered body began to make themselves felt.  “Glad to see ya, Pete.  Did Máire tell you where to find me?”

“She insisted we follow you as soon as we could.”  Pete was stooping over MacGyver, helping him to his feet; behind him, Mac saw Kathleen Walsh hurrying up, out of breath.  “What happened?  I swear I can’t have hit him – ”

“You didn’t, Pete.”  Mac flexed his left hand to see if any trace remained of the numbness.  “But he thought you were getting his range and he tried to dodge.”

“Thank a merciful God for that.” Kathleen peered down into the alleyway.  “We’ll have a body without bullet holes.  They’ll be hard put to it to make a martyr of him just for falling off a roof.”

“But Kathleen, I wasn’t even aiming at him.”

“Ah, Peter.  You really did come up the Lagan in a bubble, didn’t you?  It would never occur to Liam Doherty that you weren’t shooting to kill.”  She threaded an arm through Pete’s and gave him a long look, then turned to MacGyver.  “What I truly can’t credit is how fast Peter went up that bloody ladder.  I swear I barely made it up myself, but he never faltered.”

Pete shook his head with a self-deprecating laugh.  “You didn’t see me gasping for breath at the top.”

“Were you gasping indeed?  It didn’t hurt your aim any.  Are you always such a steady shot when you’re gasping?”

Mac grinned, the shakiness beginning to ebb.  “Hey, I’ve been telling Pete for years now that he could be a biathlon champ if he’d only get the skiing part down . . . ”

“Are you kidding?”  Pete interrupted.  “Not when it requires strapping oversized, overpriced boards to my feet and wallowing around in the snow in very cold temperatures.”

“Yeah, I know, Pete.”  MacGyver found himself exchanging a long-suffering look with Kathleen Walsh.  “Not gonna happen.”

“Well, all I can say is I’m glad it’s over.  You had me worried sick, Mac.  You know what terrorists are like.”

“Yeah, Pete.”  MacGyver looked down into the alleyway again to where a squad of Kathleen’s men were collecting the limp rag-doll form of Liam’s body.  In the open, well-lit street beyond, he could hear the Unionist crowds streaming past, leaving the rally to head home – or to their own local pubs – in safe obliviousness.  “Yeah.  I know.”

 

-


	9. Seisiun

_  
**Epilogue: Seisiun**   
_

 

Two days later, an unusually bright fall afternoon found Pete Thornton and Kathleen Walsh walking companionably along the embankment in Ormeau Park overlooking the River Lagan.  The air was chilly but the sunlight felt warm, and Belfast seemed mesmerized into tranquility by the sunlight gleaming off the water.

“Would you look at her now?”  Kathleen waved a desultory hand, and Pete wondered if she meant the river, the city, or the land itself.  “Smiling so sweetly as if she hadn’t a care in the world or any notion of conflict.  And underneath, she’ll be nursing her grievances and brooding on her next move.”

Pete squinted into the sharply angled sunlight.  “Any idea what the next move will be?”

“Maggie Thatcher’s hutch of pet rabbits will begin debating the Anglo-Irish Agreement tomorrow in the House of Commons.”  Kathleen sighed.  “And this, too shall pass . . . probably by an overwhelming majority, who will then fail to carry out any effective steps towards actual peace.  Another critical Irish decision taken in London.  Another historical footnote . . . without you and MacGyver, the footnote would have been another list of casualties.”

Pete nodded.  “That’s the nature of the business.  When we do our work right, nobody knows we’ve done anything at all.”

“It’s a daft enough job, this business of staying out of the history books.”  Kathleen began to recite in a broad parody of a BBC announcer, the mimicked British accent sounding strange in Pete’s ears.  “‘25 November 1985.  On this day in Belfast, no-one was murdered.  No-one was gunned down in the street in front of their children, disappeared to be found lying dead in an empty lot, or shot by the police under questionable circumstances.  No hunger strikers died in prison.  The army found no caches of illegal weapons.  No bombs were detonated against any civilian, governmental or military targets.’”  She sighed again and dug her hands into her pockets.  “No birds were flying on the sea . . . there were no birds to fly.”  Her voice returned to its usual tone and accent.  “Mind you, that was the afternoon news bulletin.  It’s early yet.”

Pete retrieved her hand from its pocket and clasped it warmly.  “A slow news day, we’d call it – the sort of day when the papers start reporting any kind of nutty nonsense just to fill their pages.”

“Let me guess – ‘Elvis found drinking in Falls Road pub, admits to Provo sympathies.’  Or even more unlikely:  ‘Demented Yankee tourist battles IRA snipers with pennywhistles’.”

“Yeah, something like that.”  Pete tucked her hand under his arm and they began to stroll again.  “Can you hope for more dull days like this one?”

“We have to live in that hope, or go mad.”  Kathleen scuffed her feet through the fallen leaves.  “How is MacGyver doing now?  They said he was a perfect mule about not staying in hospital.”

Pete laughed ruefully.  “I could have told them he’s like that.  Don’t worry; he wasn’t badly hurt, and he’s young.  He bounces back fast.  I remember when I used to do that myself . . . it doesn’t seem so long ago.”

“And were you a perfect mule yourself?”

“Whaddya mean, ‘were’?”

Kathleen laughed and squeezed his hand.

“How about Máire?” Pete asked.  “I saw you have her under round-the-clock guard.  She can’t be happy about that.”

Kathleen gave an exasperated sigh.  “Why must all our thoroughbreds be mules underneath?  She’s livid.  But her cover’s blown wide open.  Once she’s testified, she’s on the next plane out of here, if I have to knock her out and strap her down.”

“More of your best talent shipped overseas.”

Kathleen shrugged in resignation.  “Word is that Padraig’s book is taking off in the States.  She’s going to be doing a lecture tour . . . Peter, they may still go after her even that far away . . . ”

“I’ll have a talk with some contacts of mine,” Pete said quietly.

Kathleen gave him an unhappy look.  “I’ve already made some inquiries myself – your government can’t be bothered to help.  Not without something more solid to go on.”

Pete smiled reassuringly.  “These are private contacts I have with a civilian group – I think I can interest them in the project, even if it’s only as a favor to me.  I’m confident we can make certain her security is up to scratch.”

Kathleen frowned.  “And what kind of price will they put on that kind of favor?”

“Well, they’re trying to hire me away from my current bosses, so they’ve got a pretty strong incentive to make me happy.”

“Are the headhunters after you then?”  Pete’s only reply was a noncommittal shrug.  “Will they succeed?”

“I don’t know.  I’m still thinking about it.”

They had reached the point where Ormeau Bridge crossed the Lagan.  Pete wondered what point along the bridge’s span marked the invisible boundary between the Protestant enclave behind them and the Catholic neighborhood across the river.  People had died disputing this border, but all he saw was a bridge across an urban river, tranquil under a slanting autumn sun.

Kathleen stopped before they had gone halfway across, and stood looking downstream, back towards the heart of the city.  “So where’s MacGyver passing his time today?”

“Would you believe he’s down at Conway’s pub again?”  Pete shook his head.  “I never thought I’d see _him_ hanging out at a bar.  I thought he was just going to say his good-byes, but he said there was a session this afternoon.  He didn’t say what kind of session.”

Kathleen laughed.  “Not ‘session’, _seisiun_ – they’ll be making music.  Caper Conway would rather play fiddle than argue politics, and that’s saying something.  He’s that mad for it.  Your MacGyver’s made quite an impression on him.”

“The funny thing is,” Pete mused, “I didn’t even know Mac played guitar.  I’ve known him for over five years, and he’s never mentioned it.”

“Did you not?  ‘Tis a good day when you learn something new about an old friend.  But that’s Ireland for you – if you’ve any music in you at all, it’ll find roots here and grow.  Even Liam Doherty was a musician once.”

“ ** _Liam_** _?_   That thug?”

“Oh, yes, Peter.  He played the uilleann pipes – wrestled the octopus, they call it.  But he was interned in 1971.  They broke both his hands and he never played again.”

“Didn’t he get any medical attention?”

Kathleen gave him a searching look with eyes that were dark with the bitter dregs of history.  “This was _internment_ , Peter.  No warrants, no charges, and no end to the foul tricks men will play when there’s no check to them . . . Liam _was_ a doctor.  They were keeping him from treating his fellow internees.”

Pete grimaced, recalling some unpalatable episodes in Vietnam.  “Was he a terrorist before he was interned?”

“Who can say?  He certainly was when they released him.”  Kathleen sighed.  “Another ball’s-up by the Crown I serve.  For over 400 years they’ve been calling it the ‘Irish question’, and they’ve a rare talent for getting the answer wrong.”

“Why did you join the military, Kathleen?” Pete asked softly.

“I thought I could make a difference.”  She leaned over the bridge rails and gazed downstream towards the sea.  “And I can.  But not here . . . today’s your last day in Belfast, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”  Pete looked out over the water.  “I can’t say I’ll miss the place . . . and I don’t think the DXS will send me back here any time soon.  If I know our Director, there’s a mountain of work piling up on my desk in L.A., waiting for me to get back.”

“Doesn’t matter.  You won’t be finding me here if you do come back.”

“Kathleen.”  Pete caught both her hands in his and turned her to face him, a broad smile spreading over his face.  “You’re kicking over the traces at last?”

She met his smile with one of her own.  “One hint from me and my old CO in Geneva renewed his pleas for me to return.  I’ve already put in for the transfer.  Can I hope to be seeing you there one day?”

“Count on it.”  Pete squeezed her hands.  “You know, I’m way overdue for some leave.  And the DXS must have some kind of loose ends in Switzerland that need to be checked.”  Pete narrowed his eyes at a sudden thought.  “What about Grant? You’re not taking him with you, are you?  Or will he transfer back to England?”

“Neither.”  A quite different smile sidled slowly across Kathleen’s face.  “I’m going to write my successor just the right kind of glowing recommendation as to guarantee that he’ll be stuck here until . . . let’s say, until lasting peace is achieved.”

“Or until Hell freezes over?”

“Hard enough for elephants to go figure skating.”

They turned their backs on the far side of the river and walked back to the Ormeau side.  Kathleen was humming abstractedly under her breath.

“You haven’t been back to the Falls since that first visit, have you, Peter?  We should go have a listen at Conway’s; they’ll be at it for hours if I know Brian Conway.  Oh, let’s go – the craic will be grand.”

Pete looked at her sharply.  “You know, I keep hearing that word and I still don’t even know what it means.  I’m pretty sure you’re not talking about a drug, though.”

“What?  Oh – you mean ‘crack’?  But that’s not the same thing at all!”

“If you say so.  The words sound exactly alike to me.”

“It’s just as addictive,” Kathleen laughed.  “It’s, well, you know – when you’re having a good time with your friends – talking, laughing, passing the time . . . drinking, maybe making music . . . you’d think there wasn’t much of that around here, wouldn’t you?  I guess we hold it so dear that we have to have a special word for it.”

They could hear the music while they were still half a block away from Conway’s pub:  the fresh breeze carried the wild strains of battling fiddles towards them, a fast and furious melody tearing along with flute and whistle and other instruments in hot pursuit, and a rattling syncopated drum rhythm hurrying the sound along to an even more frantic pace.  The music abruptly grew louder as the door of the pub was flung open and a slim blonde girl of perhaps eighteen staggered out, pale and panting, and nearly collided with Pete and Kathleen.  She started when she saw them.

“What about ye, then?  You’ll surely be Mac’s friend Pete?  Ye’d best be after rescuing him from that maniac Conway – not but what they’re all after wantin’ a piece of him!”

Alarmed, Pete pushed past the girl and dived inside, cursing the bright day and the sense of complacency that had persuaded him to come out without a gun.  The pub was dim after the sunlight outside, and his eyes were slow to adjust, but at last he could make out the rough circle of musicians gathered at one end of the room.

MacGyver was perched on a tall stool near the center, dark eyes sparkling with excitement and delight, sweat dripping down his face as his fingers scrambled over the strings of the guitar he was playing.  From the whoops and catcalls, Pete gathered that the rapid tempo was putting him on his mettle.

He recognized some of the other musicians:  Brian Conway and Séan O’Boyle were the dueling fiddle players at the heart of the group, alternately circling each other and breaking off to lean over Mac as if challenging him to keep up.  Noreen Gallagher was standing behind Mac in the circle, playing a bodhran – Pete recalled that her own drum had been one of the casualties of the battle and guessed that she, too, must be using a borrowed instrument.  The burly man beside her was Kevin O’Hare, back from the Armagh border, playing a borrowed concertina.

Matt Gallagher was off to one side grappling with a complicated set of pipes, and from the family resemblance Pete realized that the blonde girl who’d met them outside was another of Noreen’s younger siblings.  Matt saw Kathleen as she came up beside Pete and he flushed scarlet, losing his place in the tune and earning a round of cheerful abuse.

Máire Ui Súilleabháin and her plainclothes bodyguard were by the bar, doing their best to clap along in time in spite of being nearly overcome with laughter.  Máire spotted Pete and Kathleen and waved them over.

“’Twon’t be long now – Caper Conway’s idea of a nice finale is to play everything over again three times as fast as before.  They’ll have to take a break then or they’ll fuckin’ collapse.”  She gestured at MacGyver.  “Your man’s not doin’ too badly, for all it’s a borrowed guitar.”

The set spun itself into a giddy finish and the music ended in a frenetic spill of notes and more whoops.  Kevin O’Hare cuffed Mac on the shoulder, and Conway clapped him on the back before turning to scold Matt into further embarrassment.

MacGyver was gasping so hard from exertion and laughter that he could hardly speak.  “Pete, you gotta save me from these maniacs.  They all know all the same songs and they keep changin’ time signatures on me.  They’re brutal.”

From her vantage point behind him, Noreen cuffed him with the bodhran.  “And why are ye askin’ _him_ to help, darlin’?  ‘Tis the local forces you’re after needing.  Would a distraction help?”  She turned towards Conway and called out, “Caper, give us a fuckin’ break, by Christ!  We’re all perishin’.  ’Tis past time you were servin’ us a round!”

Mac set the guitar aside carefully as Noreen turned back.  “Ah, ye’re unarmed now!”  She playfully batted at him again with the drum, and he put up a hand to fend her off.

“Hey, be careful with that.  You can do some real damage with those things, trust me.”

“Trust you?  I’m fucked if I know why we’re trustin’ you in the same room with any musical instruments at all!”  Noreen ostentatiously set the bodhran down well out of Mac’s reach, and with a flourish formally presented him with the double-ended stick she used as a beater.  “Here, darlin’ – ye’d better keep hold of this just in case the UVF mount an attack.  If I don’t help Caper with the drinks he might pull some daft stunt like givin’ you something stronger than water.”  She kissed Mac enthusiastically and hurried off.

MacGyver and Pete exchanged a long look; the words _don’t ask_ and _don’t worry, I won’t_ hung in the air between them.  They found seats in a quieter area some distance away from where the musicians clustered by the bar.  A nod from Kathleen had sent the bodyguard off to wait near the door while she and Máire found another corner for conversation.

Mac twirled the beater idly in his fingers.  “Pete, you still on good terms with Rachel in accounting?”

“Are you kidding?  Ever since you fixed up that electric wheelchair for her son, she thinks you walk on water.  You could cannibalize the Concorde and she’d find a way to handle it.  How come?”

“Well, you know those ‘unofficial bonuses’ you’ve been setting up after some of my missions?”  Mac drummed the beater against his left palm.  “I’m gonna have some, well, unusual items on my expense sheet.”

Pete grinned.  “Rachel’s put herself firmly in charge of all the expense account requests for our department . . . especially the ‘unusual’ ones.  I think she likes the challenge.  What’s up?”

“The flute player offered to rearrange my features if I didn’t make good on the damage to the instruments.”

Pete studied the flute player, a thin blonde man half a head shorter than Mac who was sitting near the bar, showing Matt a fingering technique.  “He doesn’t look so tough.”

“He’s a bare-knuckles boxing champion.”

“How much can a few whistles and things cost?”

“Pete, have you ever priced accordions?  You’d think they’d pay you to take the things off their hands, but nooo.  I’m lucky it turned out to be Kevin O’Hare’s concertina I carved up – at least he owed me one already.”

Noreen had returned, carrying a glass in each hand, in time to hear Mac’s last comment.  She laughed as she handed Pete a Guinness.

“No fear – in a week’s time he’ll be tellin’ folks how MacGyver rescued Máire Ui Súilleabháin from her IRA kidnappers by makin’ a bomb out of his own concertina and a bottle of potcheen.”  Mac winced, and Noreen kissed him again and handed him a glass of something that looked suspiciously like ginger ale.  “Don’t be too long, darlin’.  Give Caper Conway twenty minutes and he’ll have written a new tune entirely, and then we’ll all have to learn it or he’ll give us no peace at all.”

“Yeah?  Then at least we’d all be learning something new instead of me always trying to catch up.”  MacGyver set down the beater and flexed his right hand, stretching the fingers.

Both men watched her hurry back to the group of musicians, exchanging rude comments punctuated by untrammeled laughter.

“ ‘No peace at all’,” Pete murmured.  “She can say something like that and she doesn’t even hear what she’s saying.  How do they do it?”  He shook his head and turned back to MacGyver.  “So the DXS will need to finance a shopping trip to a music store.  I figure the budget can handle that.  Anything else?”

“Yeah.  Noreen’s got a sister who’s finishing up a medical internship in the US.  They haven’t seen each other in years – Noreen’s never been to the States at all.”

“I think I see where you’re going with this,”  Pete said with a smile.  He mimed flipping open a pad and making a checklist.  “So, one round-trip plane ticket for Ms. Gallagher, and make sure there aren’t any hitches with her visa.  I don’t suppose you’ll be taking any vacation time while she’s on this visit?  You’ve earned it.”

Mac glanced away, and Pete thought he could see a flush on the younger man’s neck.  “Well, yeah . . . I told Noreen that while she was stateside, I’d take her camping and show her what real mountains look like.”

Pete pantomimed finishing his checklist with a flourish.  “Consider it done.”

“Okay.  Great.”  Mac looked over to where the musicians were beginning to pick up their instruments again.  “I have to get the motorbike back to Shannon before I fly out.  See you in L.A.?”

“Not right away,” Pete replied a shade too casually.  “I’m spending a few days in Geneva first.”

Mac looked at him and frowned with concern.  “I hadn’t heard there was anything brewing there.”

“Oh, no, no, nothing’s fallen apart – it isn’t on business.  I’m just taking a few days’ leave myself while I’m in Europe.”  Pete knew he was talking too quickly.  “I thought I’d get in some hiking.”

MacGyver looked him in the eye with a knowing grin.  “Pete . . . you hate hiking.”

Pete shrugged, hoping he wasn’t blushing in turn, and changed the subject hurriedly.  “Aren’t you going to ask for anything for yourself?”

Mac thoughtfully studied his left hand.  In a short session of hard playing, the guitar strings had already left deep dents in the fingertips, shadowed dark grey from rubbing against the metal wires.  The fingers would be sore tomorrow – they were sore now.  It would take a lot more playing before the callouses thickened up again, the fingers loosened fully and the thumb muscles hardened.  Meanwhile, his hands tingled and throbbed, and he thought there was a blister starting to form on his right thumb.  It felt great.

“Yeah,” he said.  “Soon’s I get home again, I’m buyin’ myself a new set of guitar strings.”

 

 _“What have I now?” said the fine old woman.  
“What have I now?” this proud old woman did say –  
“I have four green fields;  
One of them’s in bondage,  
In strangers’ hands who tried to take it from me –  
But my sons have sons, as brave as were their fathers;  
My fourth green field  
Will bloom once again,” said she._

 _**an deireadh (The End)** **  
**  
_

 _  
**Author's Afterword:**   
_

The story is set in November 1985, a decade before the beginnings of the economic renaissance of the ‘Celtic Tiger’.  In the MacGyver timeline, it takes place in the first season, not long before _Deathlock_ (which aired 1/22/86).

This story is a work of fiction; the only historical figure in this story is Margaret Thatcher.  The Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 (not to be confused with the Good Friday Agreement of 1998) is an historical fact.  So is the mass protest against it held at Belfast City Hall on 23 November 1985, including the complete absence of any deaths ascribed to the Troubles on that day or for another five days afterwards.

 

 **Musical credits:** “The Black and Tan” aka “Come Out You Black and Tans” was written by Dominic Behan; “Four Green Fields” was written in 1967 by Tommy Makem.

The rhyme from which the title was taken is much older than either song.  I first learned it in 1981, from the same musician who taught me most of my repertoire of radical Irish songs (including “The Black and Tan”).  He liked to start his sets with the rhyme, and boasted that he would pay the funeral expenses of anyone who would attempt to recite it at any pub in certain Belfast neighborhoods.

Some of the words and expressions used in the story are as follows:

 _Glipe_ – idiot.  Also eejit.

 _Supergrass_ – from ‘grass’, British slang for an informer.  In the 1980s, the British forces in Belfast made extensive use of IRA informers, some planted, others recruited, known as ‘supergrasses’.  Many of the hundreds of convictions thus obtained were subsequently overturned, but the use of supergrasses raised the level of omnipresent paranoia even higher than it already was.

 _Black and Tans_ – originally the name for a branch of the Royal Irish Constabulary active in the 1920s; has much the same connotations that ‘Gestapo’ does for the Jews.  Irish-Americans later started using the name for a drink of half-and-half Guinness and lager, an example of the remarkable Irish capacity for extremely black humour.

 _The Falls_ – the Falls Road neighborhood, still a hard-core Catholic enclave.

 _Shankill Road_ – a hard-core Protestant enclave adjacent to the Falls Road area.

 _Belfast’s “Peace Walls” or “Peace Lines”_ – are real, and still exist; in fact, there are more of them now than there were in 1985, and Belfast is more rigidly segregated today than it was twenty years ago.

 _Craic_ – the particular energy and joy from a good time spent with friends.  Often involves music, alcohol, or both.  Pronounced ‘crack’.

 _Culchie_ – derogatory term:  country bumpkin, rube, hick.

 _Looter_ – a punch in the face.

 _Faffin’ about_ – screwing around, wasting time.

 _Taig_ and _Prod_ , or _Proddy_ – the equivalent of ‘nigger’ for Catholic and Protestant respectively, although ‘Taig’ is said to carry a heavier weight of abnegating hatred.

 _What about ye?_ – basically means “Hi, how are you?”

 _Potcheen_ – home-made liquor, spelled _poitín_ in Gaelic.

 _UVF_ – the Ulster Volunteer Force, one of the many Protestant paramilitary organizations.

 _RUC_ – the Royal Ulster Constabulary.  This Northern Ireland police force was notorious for sectarian attitudes and questionable acts of violence.

 _Long Kesh_ – the principal site of internment of suspected IRA associates and later, of imprisonment for paramilitary convicts.  Renamed the Maze Prison in 1976.  It was the site of the ‘blanket protests’, the ‘dirty protest’ and the hunger strikes of the 70s and 80s.

 _Provos_ – another name for the Provisional IRA.  For a detailed explanation of the history of the IRA, the Provisional IRA, Sinn Féin, Provisional Sinn Féin, Republican Sinn Féin, etc., see the bibliography below, but don’t blame me if your head explodes.  
     And if you want a simple explanation . . . dream on.

 _Shite_ – is considered a relatively mild term, and can be used in most levels of polite company, even in the mainstream press.

 _Arse_ – ditto.

 _Feckin’_ – a milder version of The Other Word.

 _The Other Word_ – really is used as freely as represented, if not more so.  I toned it down.  Really.

For anyone interested in learning more about the Troubles, I’ve listed some of my source materials below.  However, along with the books I particularly recommend the following songs:

“The House of Orange” by Stan Rogers, from the album _From Fresh Waters._

“The Town I Loved So Well” by Phil Coulter (numerous recordings).

“Children Born of Hate” (traditional, numerous recordings).

And, of course, “Four Green Fields” by Tommy Makem:  I especially recommend the version on _The Makem and Clancy Collection_.  Another fine rendition, sung by Paul Harrington, can be found on the DVD of the dance show _Celtic Tiger_.

 **  
_Selected Bibliography:_   
**

_Making Sense of the Troubles: The Story of the Conflict in Northern Ireland_ – David McKittrick (an exceptional book, although I found the title somewhat ironic).

 _Northern Ireland:  A Chronology of the Troubles_ – Paul Bew  & Gordon Gillespie.

 _Lost Lives: The Stories of the Men, Women and Children Who Died as a Result of the Northern Ireland Troubles_ – David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney, Chris Thornton, David McVea.

 _Falls Road Memories_ – Gerry Adams.

 _Resurrection Man_ , _Blue Tango_ and _The Last of Deeds_ – Eoin MacNamee.

I also highly recommend Edward Rutherfurd’s “Dublin Saga”, _The Princes of Ireland_ and _The Rebels of Ireland_ (although the first half of _Princes_ should be skipped by anyone interested in actual history).  He ends his story half a century before the beginning of the Troubles, but the books are a good way to get a sense of the long and bitter background of the conflict, as well as being just plain good storytelling.

 **  
_Web-based resources:_   
**

Wikipedia has numerous articles, which have been chewed over enough by both sides to be a reasonable source of factual information, although inevitably dry.

A terrific article on the Ulster dialect of English (badly formatted, but wonderful reading):  http://members.tripod.com/~Shinann/article.htm

Growing Up on Shankill Road:  http://sidmoffatt.blogspot.com/2005/03/growing-up-on-shankill-road-belfast.html

Photo essay of the West Belfast “peace line”: http://www.citynoise.org/article/48


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